Adrian Glynde

by Martin Armstrong

  When Easter came Oliver Glynde was abroad and Adrian spent the holidays at Yarn. His uncle and aunt thought him listless and moody, and Clara tried to rouse him, not without occasional success, by discreetly and indiscreetly poking fun at him. Bob’s method was to ignore the change and treat him exactly as usual. “Don’t bother him too much,” he said to Clara. “The boy’s growing up.”

  “I thought that growing up meant waking up,” said Clara, “but Adrian seems to be going to sleep.”

  “Yes, seems,” said Bob. “But don’t you believe it. When young people go to sleep outwardly, it generally means that there is a lot of waking up going on inside.”

  “My dear Bob!”

  Clara glanced at him, surprised, reflective, with raised eyebrows.

  “It’s a fact, Clara,” he said.

  Clara smiled. “I take your word for it, my dear,” she said. Then after a meditative pause she added: “I wonder how many of our friends notice that, when it comes to human nature, you know about four times as much as I do.” Again she was silent, her eyebrows arched, her mouth set in the meditative, half-humorous placidity so typical of her. Then again her eyes and mouth grew animated. “The difference between you and me, Bob,” she said, “is that you camouflage your wisdom and I camouflage my ignorance. Most of our friends, I suspect, are like people walking about on a dark night. They bump against something large and solid, which the darkness prevents them from fully comprehending. That’s you. Then they turn a corner and come upon a glittering, flashing, rather vulgar edifice which recalls the Crystal Palace. That’s me. If they were to return by daylight they would find in place of the Crystal Palace a few scraps of burnt paper, a slight smell of gunpowder, and a vast flat wire skeleton, the wreckage of what the firework-makers call’ a set piece’; and they would discover that what they had bumped into in the dark was … well, St. Alban’s Abbey.”

  Adrian came into the room at that moment, and Bob turned to him. “Adrian, what steps am I to take? Your aunt has just called me a cathedral.”

  “That’s nothing,” said Adrian. “Yesterday she said I was like Bond Street on a Sunday.”

  “And there’s no redress?”

  “Not for me,” said Adrian, “because I am afraid that, as a matter of fact, I was.”

  “Poor Adrian,” said Clara. “But you mustn’t take too much notice of what I say. You should receive my talk as your grandfather does.”

  “And how is that?” asked Adrian.

  “He selects me,” said Clara; “and then edits me with copious notes and glosses. I can see him doing it whilst I am talking to him, and the sight is both salutary and stimulating. But when I said you were like Bond Street on Sunday I wasn’t complaining: I was only remarking. I didn’t mean to imply that you were boring, my dear, but bored. However, it may very well be true that Bond Street is never itself, its true self, except on Sunday. So long as you’re enjoying your holidays …!”

  “Oh, I’m doing that all right,” said Adrian, and he meant what he said. Yet he could not have said that he was happy, nor, on the other hand, unhappy. The prospect of Ronny’s leaving at the end of next term was almost continually present to his mind. He could neither forget nor fully realise it: his mind ached numbly, like chilled hands on a frosty day. He had foreseen that it would be so with him and had determined to provide against it, and so he had asked his aunt if he might hire a piano during the holidays. He would practise hard, he had resolved, at Bach—nothing but Bach, and he would work at a string trio which he had already been ruminating for some time. It was to be a birthday present for his grandfather.

  Now the piano was duly bestowed in a room where it was inaudible from the other living-rooms, and every day he worked hard at his practising and composing.

  Clara shook her head over both. “I don’t know what the Glyndes are coming to,” she said. “For centuries they have been irreproachable Englishmen. Then your grandfather took to poetry and our eighteen or twenty generations of ancestors turned in their graves. Now, as if that were not enough, you threaten the family with a musician. Music, of course, is even more indecent than poetry. To a Glynde, a true Glynde, music implies concertinas, monkeys, and fleas, long hair, an aversion from soap and water, something almost Italian.”

  “Do I understand,” replied Adrian, “that you are a true Glynde, Aunt Clara?”

  “Half of me is,” she answered, “but the other half isn’t: that is your grandfather’s fault. He developed my mind, taught me to use my eyes and ears, to be independent, sceptical, discriminating, a disgusting thing to do to a little Glynde. And I was a very promising little Glynde, much more so than your father: so promising, in fact, that your grandfather was only partially successful. The feelings of a Glynde remain in me: they rise instinctively under the amused scrutiny of my father’s daughter. I really do, Adrian, in my heart of hearts, think it shocking to write poetry and even prose, though I allow myself the indulgence of enjoying prose. As for music, it seems to me more shocking than either. One might as well walk naked in the streets or blurt out one’s most intimate feelings in the Euston Road.”

  “Then a true Glynde, I suppose,” said Adrian, “would never express any feelings.”

  “Never,” said Clara; “or, rather, only in such a way as never to betray any. Ages ago, my dear Adrian, the Glyndes invented, as safeguards against the betrayal of feeling, a series of useful expressions, such as So sorry, Truly delighted, Kindest regards, Fondest love, and so on. All self-respecting English families have used them ever since, the Glyndes, of course, among them, until your grandfather betrayed us by breaking out into poetry. And now you, as you tell me, are actually exposing yourself in a string trio.”

  Adrian laughed, but even though he laughed he knew there was a good deal of truth under Aunt Clara’s banter, and, in fact, even more than she knew. For the ferment of unexpressed feelings, to which he was at present a prey, found vent in the music he was writing, and so immediately, so nakedly, that at moments he could hardly believe that the music did not betray him, that it would not communicate explicitly the feelings it so vividly symbolised for him. The work relieved him greatly, for the intellectual labour of expressing his pent feelings in artistic form brought a warm, secret satisfaction. It was not that this expression of his emotions mitigated their sharpness: it seemed rather that it increased it. But it also did something else: it transformed for him the idle drift of unavoidable but useless emotion into what seemed to him something positive, shapely, and valuable. In Bach, on the other hand—the stern intellectual Bach which he selected for his practising—he escaped for a while from all particular and personal feelings into a kind of mathematical ecstasy which was positively invigorating.

  But in all three of these preoccupations of his, the anxieties about Ronny, the composition of the trio, and the practising of Bach, he was haunting worlds unknown to Yarn. During most of the hours he spent in his room he was quite unconscious of his surroundings: indeed, except during meals and the hours he spent with his aunt and uncle, he was more truly absent from the familiar house and garden than when, at Charminster, his thoughts often haunted them. He lived suspended in a sort of limbo of feelings not happy, not quite unhappy, but certainly deep, certainly acute. No wonder they thought him listless and moody. Clara was right: he was very like Bond Street on Sunday. His blinds were drawn, he presented closed shutters to the world, and the things within, the precious and the cheap, the beautiful, the ugly, the fantastic, were hidden in an artificial twilight.

  XVI

  As soon as he was back at Charminster Adrian’s way of life changed completely. He no longer lived in those detached worlds he had haunted during the holidays. Old Heller had been amazed and delighted at the results of his assiduous piano practice at Yarn, but now Adrian practised barely enough to content him. He seemed to have lost most of his interest in music. The completed fragment of the trio was shut away in a drawer. All his windows were unshuttered: he looked outward, not inward. His whole exi
stence was concentrated on Ronny. He became ingenious in making plots for seeing him: he discovered beforehand what his movements were to be and then planned his own so as to meet Ronny as if by accident. This patient and elaborate craftiness succeeded surprisingly: he saw much more of Ronny than ever before, and Ronny showed no signs of resenting it. No doubt he never suspected the craft that lay behind: if he had stopped to consider the matter at all he would probably have believed that it was the result of his own will and pleasure.

  But despite the success of his schemes, Adrian was not happy. It was not merely the fast approaching separation from Ronny that disturbed him. Much more it was his peculiar relation to him. The increase in their intimacy only served to show him more clearly the unreality of his attitude. For he and Ronny had little in common. Ronny was as kind-hearted, as easy, as cheerful, and as charming as ever, but he was not interested in most of the things that interested Adrian. He lived, it seemed, on the surface of life. He loved games and he loved people, but his love of people was diffused. He had neither the capacity nor the need for intimate friendship. He liked to be the centre of a moving crowd, or rather a revolving crowd, a crowd of familiar individuals with each of which, as in a game, he came into brief, frequent, and lively contact. But it was impossible not merely for Adrian but for anyone else at Charminster to get at him. He remained secluded and elusive behind his screen of cheerfulness and charm. By slow degrees Adrian had begun to realise this, but unhappily the realisation did not detach him from Ronny. His feelings for him remained stubbornly unaltered. The sight of him, the sound of his approaching footsteps, produced in him the same acute emotions as ever. An unexpected meeting with him thrilled him no less profoundly than in early days. It was almost, he sometimes felt, as if he were caught in a trap. If only he could escape, if only, by some sudden miracle, he could be cured, what a relief it would be. But what he could not do was deliberately to make the effort to escape, to impose upon himself, against the instinct of his heart, the long, dreary mental discipline which in the end might cure him. It is only when the heart is warmly housed that we can obey the stern and arduous dictates of the mind, for then heart and mind work in unison. But in Adrian heart and mind were at variance. If his mother, when he met her after all those years at Yarn, had fulfilled his cherished image of her—that image which, in the sharpness of his need, he had made out of forgetfulness of the worst of her and remembrance of the best—his heart, at that critical time, would perhaps have found safe anchorage, and never drifted rudderless, to strand at last on this bright but desert island. But for Adrian himself his predicament was a mystery. He knew only that he was impaled on a dilemma. He suffered, and clung desperately to the cause of his suffering. His one thought now was to bind Ronny to him, so as to hold him even though they were separated at the end of the term. If he could get him to come and stay during the holidays, that, he felt, would form an additional bond. His grandfather had told him that he could always bring a friend when he went to him in the summer. He determined to invite Ronny. But no sooner had he conceived the idea than he began to feel how difficult it would be to do so. At the mere thought of it he was overcome with a kind of fear. It was a matter of such urgency, such tremendous importance, to him that it seemed to him that it would be impossible to control himself to an ordinary composure when asking it. He spent much time in planning beforehand what he would say so that he should avoid becoming confused and inarticulate under the stress of his feelings. He would begin by talking of his grandfather: that would be the best way. Ronny knew, of course, everybody at Taylor’s knew, that his grandfather was Oliver Glynde. If they were talking of his grandfather it ought to be easy to suggest, as if the idea had just occurred to him, that Ronny should come to Abbot’s Randale. But days passed, and weeks, and he could not bring himself to speak. When he tried to brace himself to do so, panic seized him, his heart beat furiously, and he took cowardly refuge in postponement.

  But at last, when Ronny chanced to ask him where he was going to spend his holidays, he forced himself to snatch the opportunity. “I’m going to my grandfather’s,” he said, and then he heard himself continuing in an absurdly tremulous voice: “It’s … it’s a ripping place. You … you wouldn’t come there for a bit, I suppose?”

  Ronny glanced at him. The question had sounded so off-hand that he hardly knew if it was meant. Adrian avoided his eyes. He was waiting in a dumb agony for the result of his immense daring.

  “What, stay with you there, you mean?” Ronny asked.

  “Yes,” said Adrian, his face suddenly reddening. “I wish you would.” His voice had a curious little break in it. His tongue and lips felt dry.

  “It’s awfully good of you, Little Man,” said Ronny, and for a moment Adrian’s hopes were high. But they were instantly shattered. “But it couldn’t be managed,” Ronny went on. “I’ve always such a lot of things on in the summer hols.”

  “You couldn’t manage a week even, or just a day or two?” Adrian faltered, and as he spoke the words he remembered that day two years ago when he had come upon Ellenger in the study doorway asking just what he was asking now, almost in the very words. In a moment he would be slinking miserably away as Ellenger had done, and perhaps the same mysterious estrangement would fall between him and Ronny. That memory extinguished his last spark of hope. He hardly heard Ronny’s reply. Next moment Ronny had neatly changed the subject and Adrian dared not persist. He pulled himself together and swallowed his bitter disappointment with more grace than Ellenger had done. He even managed to reply cheerfully to Ronny’s gay screen of chatter. When, ten minutes later, he left the study, Ronny rewarded his submissiveness.

  “We’ll be bound to meet later on in London or somewhere, Little Man,” he said. “I’m not going to lose sight of you.”

  Adrian paused at the door. “And would you … perhaps … write sometimes?” he asked.

  Ronny’s brows contracted slightly. “Well … I’m a rotten correspondent, you know,” he said. Then his face cleared. “But if you write, I’ll damn well have to answer, won’t I?”

  Adrian went out. The worst had happened: his scheme had failed, as he might have guessed, all the time, that it would. He sighed, but felt to his surprise that it was a sigh of relief. He was not, for some reason, as miserable as he ought to have been. Perhaps the relief brought by the end of his suspense, the feeling that he had at last got the thing off his chest, counteracted his disappointment. He had allowed it to prey on him and his mind had inflated it, day by day, into a matter of fantastic gravity. Now he was free of it. The blow had fallen and he felt little worse than before. As for the future, it was entirely vague. He hardly believed that Ronny once he had settled down elsewhere, would really want to see him. That was not in his nature.

  For the brief remainder of the term Adrian lived from day to day; and in a flash, it seemed, the end of term came, Ronny vanished out of his life, and he found himself solitary at his grandfather’s taking stern refuge in Bach and in work on the neglected trio. But he did not exist so wholly in Limbo as he had done at Yarn last Easter, for it was impossible to be in the same house as Oliver Glynde and remain entirely detached from life. The old man’s company was as stimulating as ever, and it was now wonderfully healing to heart and mind. He felt melancholy but not empty, and he would have asked nothing better than to live on, day after day, as he was living at present, in a kind of emotional convalescence.

  The only thing he dreaded now was his return to Charminster. He dreaded the emptiness that he would find there. If only he too could have left at the end of last term. But what excuse could he have offered to his uncle and aunt and grandfather? He could have given no convincing pretext for his wish to be taken away so early; for he was not yet eighteen and was making excellent progress in everything expected of a schoolboy. No, he would have to go back and make the best of it.