The Wrong Set and Other Stories

by Angus Wilson

  But Miranda Searle took no notice. ‘Oh what fun!’ she cried. ‘Now you can tell me all about those houseparties and the dreadful things that people confess to. I’ve always wanted to hear about that. I remember when the Dean of St Mary’s shared once. He got up in public and said that he’d slept with his niece. It wasn’t true, of course, because I know for a fact that he’s impotent. But still it was rather sweet of him, because she’s a terribly plain girl and it gave her a sexual cachet that brought her wild successes. After that I went through Oxford inventing the most wonderful things that I said people had shared with me until I was threatened with libel by the entire Theological Faculty.’

  ‘Oh, it’s quite impossible’ said Elspeth and in her agitation she overturned the bowl of gooseberries. She felt glad to hide her scarlet face and her tears of vexation in an agitated attempt to pick them up.

  ‘Oh please, please’ said Miranda. ‘It couldn’t matter less.’ At that moment the tweed-clothed knickerbockered figure of Mr Searle came down the path towards them. ‘Henry’ called his wife. ‘Henry, you never told me Miss Eccles was a “Grouper”. She was just going to share with me, and it must have been something very exciting because it made her upset the gooseberries. Take her down to the pub for a drink. That’s just the place for a good man-to-man sharing. Perhaps you can get that barmaid to tell you what goes on in Hodge’s field, or Mr Ratcliffe might even confess about that poor goat. Whatever you find out you must report to me at once.’

  Mr Searle put down his glass of port, and drawing his handkerchief from the sleeve into which it was tucked, he carefully wiped his neatly trimmed grey moustache. With his well worn dinner jacket and his old patent leather pumps he looked far more like a retired military man or an impoverished country squire than a Professor of English Poetry, and so he would have wished it. The evening had been hot and the French windows had been left open; a cool night breeze had begun to invade the room. Now that Mrs Searle had gone upstairs Elspeth felt able to put her little blue woollen coat round her shoulders. She had decided to wear an evening dress as a concession to her host’s formality, and yet it was largely the presence of her hostess with her long brocade gown that had kept her to the decision after the first evening. She felt sad that this was the last of their talks together – talks which she enjoyed all the more for the elegance of the room and the glass of kümmel which he was careful to pour out for her each evening, though she felt that to admit to such sensual pleasure was in some sense a capitulation to Miranda’s influence in the house. But once her hostess had retired, the sense of strain was gone and she could adopt a certain hedonism as of her own right. No doubt he would have to face the same sordid scene tonight, no doubt he would have to face such bouts on and off until that woman died. She had failed lamentably this morning to achieve anything. But, at least, their discussions together had freed him from the strain, had allowed him to relax. I shall try once more, she thought, to make him talk about it, to impress upon him that his work is too important to be shelved for someone else’s selfishness, that he must assert himself. This time I must act more subtly, less directly.

  ‘There seems no doubt’ she said ‘that the Naples birth certificate is genuine. A child was born to Shelley by someone other than Mary, and that person could hardly have been Claire Clairemont, despite all Byron’s ugly gossip. The question is who was the mother?’

  ‘Yes’ said Professor Searle. ‘It’s a mystery which I don’t suppose will be solved, like many others in Shelley’s life. I sometimes doubt whether we have any right to solve them. Oh! don’t think I’m denying the importance of the biographical element in literary appreciation. I know very well how much a full knowledge of a writer’s life, yes, I suppose even of his unconscious life, adds to the interpretation of his work; particularly, of course, with any writers so fundamentally subjective as the Romantics. But I’m more and more disinclined to expose skeletons that have been so carefully buried. I suppose it’s a reticence that comes with old age’ he added.

  ‘I doubt if it’s a defensible standpoint’ said Elspeth. ‘Think of the importance of Mary Shelley’s relations with Hogg and with Peacock, what a lot they explain of Shelley’s own amoral standpoint towards married fidelity. Or again, how much of Leigh Hunt’s instability and failure can be put down to the drain of his wife’s secret drinking.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so’ said Professor Searle. ‘But when one appreciates a man’s work deeply, it means in the long run respecting him and respecting his wishes. You see it isn’t only the revealing of facts that have been carefully hidden, it’s our interpretation that may be so vitally wrong, that would hurt the dead so. We blame Mary for her infidelity and Mrs Hunt for her insobriety, but who knows if that is not exactly the thing that Shelley and Hunt would most have hated? Who knows if they did not hold themselves responsible?’

  Elspeth spoke quite abruptly. ‘Do you hold yourself responsible for your wife’s drinking?’ she asked.

  Professor Searle drained his glass of port slowly, then he said ‘I’ve been afraid that this would happen. I think you have made a mistake in asking such a question. Oh! I know you will say I am afraid of the truth, but I still think there are things that are better left unsaid. But now that you have asked me I must answer – yes, in a large degree, yes.’

  ‘How? how?’ asked Elspeth impatiently.

  ‘My wife was a very beautiful woman and a very brilliant one. Not the brilliance that belongs to the world of scholars, the narrow and often pretentious world of Universities, but to a wider society of people who act as well as think. Don’t imagine that I do not fully recognize the defects of this wider world – it is an arrogant world, placing far too great a value upon what it vaguely calls “experience”, too often resorting to action to conceal its poor and shoddy thinking; as a young scholar married to a woman of this world its faults were all too apparent to me. Nevertheless, however I may have been a fish out of water there, it was her world and because I was afraid of it, because I did not shine there, I cut her off from it, and in so doing I embittered her, twisted her character. There were other factors, of course, the shock of our boy’s death did not help, and then there were other things’ he added hurriedly ‘things perhaps more important.’

  ‘Well, I think that’s all fudge’ said Elspeth. ‘You have something important to give and you’ve allowed her selfish misery to suck your vitality until now it is doubtful whether you will ever write any more.’

  ‘I am going to do the unforgivable ’said Prof. Searle. ‘I am going to tell you that you are still very young. I doubt if my wife’s tragedy has prevented me from continuing to write, though I could excuse my laziness in that way. What takes place between my wife and me has occurred so often now, the pattern is so stereotyped, that, awful though it may be, my mind, yes, and my feelings have become hardened to the routine. To you, even though it is only guessed at, or perhaps for that very reason, it will seem far more awful than it can ever again seem to me. That is why, although I had hoped that your visit might help the situation, I soon realized that pleasant as it has been and I shall always remember our discussions, the presence of a third person, the possibility that you might be a spectator was weighing upon me heavily.’ He lit a cigarette and sat back in silence. Why did I say that? he thought, I ought first to have crossed my fingers. So far we have avoided any scene in the presence of this girl, but by mentioning the possibility I was tempting Providence. This evening too, when the danger is almost over, and yet so near, for Miranda had clearly already been drinking when dinner was served, and these scenes come about so suddenly.

  ‘Well, my dear’ he said ‘I think we had better retire. Don’t worry, perhaps I shall finish the Peacock letters this long vacation. Who knows? I’ve got plenty of notes and plenty of time. And, please, whatever I may have said, remember that your visit has been a most delightful event in my life.’

  But he had made his decision too late. In the doorway stood Miranda Searle, swaying slightly, her fac
e flushed, her hand clutching the door lintel in an effort to steady herself.

  ‘Still sharing?’ she asked in a thick voice, then she added with a coarse familiarity, ‘You’ll have to stop bloody soon or we’ll never get to sleep.’ Her husband got up from his chair. ‘We’re just coming’ he said quietly. Miranda Searle leant against the doorway and laughed; points of light seemed to be dancing in her eyes as malice gleamed forth. ‘Darling’ she drawled in her huskiest tones ‘the “we” sounds faintly improper, or are we to carry the sharing principle to the point of bed?’

  Elspeth hoisted her great height from the chair and stood awkwardly regarding her hostess for a second. ‘That’s a very cheap and disgusting remark’ she said. Henry Searle seemed to have lost all life, he bent down and touched a crack in his patent leather slippers. But the malicious gleam in Miranda’s eyes faded, leaving them cold and hard. ‘Washing dirty linen in public is disgusting’ she said, and as she spoke her mouth seemed to slip sideways. ‘Not that there’s much to share. You’re welcome to it all. He’s no great cop, you know.’ She managed by the force of her voice to make the slang expressions sound like an obscenity. ‘I pumped one kid out of him, but it finished him as a man.’

  Professor Searle seemed to come alive again, his hand went out in protest; but his resurrection was too slow, before he could cross the room Elspeth had sprung from her chair. Towering over the other woman she slapped her deliberately across the face, then putting her hands on her shoulders she began to shake her.

  ‘You ought to be put away’ she said. ‘Put away where you can do no more harm.’

  Miranda Searle lurched to get free of the girl’s grasp, her long bony hands came up to tear at the girl’s arms, but in moving she caught her heel in the rose brocade skirt and slipped ridiculously to the ground. The loss of dignity seemed to remove all her fury, she sat in a limp heap, the tears streaming from her eyes. ‘If they’d left me my boy, he wouldn’t have let this happen to me,’ she went on repeating. Her husband helped her to her feet and, taking her by the elbow, he led her from the room. Elspeth could hear her voice moaning in the corridor. ‘Why did they take him away? What have I done to be treated in this way?’ and the Professor’s voice soothing, pacifying, reassuring.

  It was many weeks later when Elspeth returned to Oxford. She spent the first evening of term with Kenneth Orme, the Steffansson Reader in Old Norse, also an ex-pupil of Professor Searle. To him she felt able to disclose the whole story of that fateful evening.

  ‘…. I didn’t wait to see either of them the next morning’ she ended. ‘I just packed my bag and stole out. I do not wish ever to see her again, and he, I felt, would have been embarrassed. It may be even that I have had to sacrifice his friendship in order to help.’ Elspeth hoped that her voice sounded calm, that Kenneth could not guess what this conclusion meant to her. ‘All the same whatever the cost I think it did some good. Drunk as she was I think she realized that there were some people with whom she could not play tricks, who were quite prepared to give her what she deserved. At any rate, it let a breath of fresh air into a very fetid atmosphere.’

  Kenneth Orme looked at her with curiosity. ‘Breaths of air can be rather dangerous’ he said. ‘People catch chills from them, you know, and sometimes they are fatal chills.’

  ‘Oh, no fear of that with Miranda Searle’ said Elspeth. ‘I wish there was, but she’s far too tough.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of Mrs Searle’ replied Kenneth. ‘I was thinking of the Professor. He’s not returning this term, you know. He’s had a complete breakdown.’

  UNION REUNION

  THEY could hardly keep their gaze on the low, one-storeyed house as they came up the long, straight drive, so did the sunlight reflected from the glaring white walls hurt and crack their eyeballs. Down the staring white facade ran the creepers in steams of blood – splashes of purple and crimson bougainvillea pouring into vermilion pools of cannas in the flower beds below, the whole massed red merging into the tiny scarlet drops of Barbiton daisies and salvia that bordered the garden in trim ranks. The eyes of the visitors sought relief to the left of the veranda where the house came to an abrupt end, revealing the boundless panorama of the Umgeni valley beyond. The brown and green stretches of the plain lay so flat and seemed so near in the shimmering air that Laura felt as though she could have stretched out her hand to stroke the smooth levels far, far out into the white heat mists of the horizon, could have dabbled her fingers in the tiny streamer-like band of the great river as it curved and wound across the middle distance, and imitating Gulliver, could have removed with a simple gesture the clusters of corrugated iron huts with which Coolie poverty had marred the landscape. Here it lay – the background of her girlhood to which she had returned after twenty years and over so many thousands of miles.

  For a moment she paused and stared into the distance. Nothing seemed to have changed since her childhood, and now it was as though its sleeping beauty had been awakened by the kiss of her sudden return. Thoughts and feelings which had lain dormant since she had left South Africa as a girl of twenty came pouring into her mind. Fragments of the scene had been with her, of course, throughout the years, distortedly as the background of her dreams or like flotsam attracted to the surface for a moment by some chance smell or sound in a London street, but always evasive, sinking back into the subconscious before she could see clearly. Now at last there was no puzzle; the blur of intervening years was gone and she saw it once more with the eyes of her youth.

  But it was not with the Umgeni valley that she had to deal, it was with the family group drawn up to meet her. She could not indulge in the slow, soothing nostalgia of unchanged nature, must face the disturbing conflict of changed humanity. The harsh visual discord of the façade of the house seemed repeated upon the veranda with the men in their bright duck suits standing uneasily at the back and the women in their violently coloured linen and silk dresses seated in deck chairs in the foreground.

  How enormous her sisters-in-law had grown, Laura reflected, but then it was easy to understand in this hot climate where they ate so much and moved so little; it was the price one had to pay for plentiful food and cheap motorcars. Certainly the new short dresses with their low waists and shapeless bodices were not an advantage to stout women and made them look so many brightly painted barrels. She had been so angry at detecting superiority in Harry’s manner towards her family on their arrival, but with all his faults she had married a man who appreciated smartness and, really, there was no other word for her sisters-in-law but blowsy. Flo, in particular, who had been such a fine, dark-haired girl, almost Spanish-looking people had said, seemed to have cheapened herself dreadfully. Harry had said she looked as though she kept a knocking shop and although, of course, it was a most unfair remark, one couldn’t help laughing. Laura tried for a moment to visualize Flo at one of her bridge parties in Kensington or Worthing – what would Lady Amplefield have said? The badly hennaed hair, the over-rouged cheeks and the magenta frock with its spray of gold flowers – could it be? – Yes, it actually was made of velvet, and in this heat; but it was wrong to make fun of Flo like that, for in spite of all that mischief-makers might say, the doctor had told her that Flo had been very kind to her little David at the end. It was terrible to think of her son dying out here so far away from her and she tried never to dwell on it, but she must always be thankful to Flo for what she had done. That must be Flo’s girl, Ursula, she decided, who was winding up the gramophone. How everyone seemed to like that ‘What’ll I do?’ But then waltz tunes were always pretty. She wondered whether her nieces had as many boys as she had had at their age. Of course it would all be different now, but though she had grown to accept the more formal standards demanded of young people in ‘the old country’ she remembered with pleasure the free and easy life she had led as a girl, and that was in 1900 so what would it be like in this post-war world of 1924? Of course such ways wouldn’t do in England, she quite saw that; but it had been a happy childhood. H
ere was Minnie coming to meet them. So she still took the lead in the family, and Flo and Edie probably still resented it; well more fools they for putting up with it. Minnie, at least, had kept some trace of her looks, with her corn-coloured hair and baby blue eyes, her skin too was still as delicate as ever, but she’d let her figure go. What a lot of one’s life was wasted in unnecessary jealousies, Laura thought, as she watched her youngest sister-in-law approaching. She could remember so well the countless picnics and dances that had been spoilt for her through envy of Minnie’s tiny hands and feet and now such features were not even particularly admired, and on poor Minnie’s mountainous body they looked positively grotesque. She watched the enormous figure in powder blue muslin teetering towards them on high-heeled white shoes, the pink and white angel’s face, with its pouts and dimples and halo of golden hair, smiling and grimacing above the swaying balloon-like body, and she was filled with the first revulsion she had felt that day. If only it had not been Minnie with whom she had to make first contact. She could not overcome her distrust and dislike of her youngest sister-in-law. Her other sisters-in-law kissed her and squeezed her arm and gave her confidences and she did not shrink back, but with Minnie it always seemed so false. Of course they had all felt that Minnie had tricked Bert into the marriage and Bert had been her favourite brother, but then it was all so long ago now and Bert was dead. She really must try to forget these things, being away so long had kept them fresh in her mind. Queen Anne’s dead, she said to herself with a grimace, but she knew that she would never really forgive Flo and Edie if they had forgotten that Minnie was an intruder into the family. The clipped, pettish voice and the childish lisp had not disappeared anyway, she reflected, as her sister-in-law’s greeting became audible. Surely Harry would not be fascinated with Minnie’s baby talk now that it came out of an elephant, as he had been in 1913 when Bert had brought his slim, attractive bride to London for their honeymoon.