The Wrong Set and Other Stories

by Angus Wilson

  Jennie and Hamish were sitting on a wooden platform up in an elm tree when Peter found them. They were practising tying knots in a piece of rope. Peter’s anger must have shown itself for Jennie called out ‘Welcome, darling, welcome to the Tree House. You ought to make three salaams before you’re allowed in, but we’ll let you off this time, won’t we Hamish?’ ‘Certainly’ said Hamish, who also appeared anxious to placate Peter. ‘I thought you went to Church on Sunday mornings’ said Peter. ‘Everything must give way to the hospitality due to friends’ said Hamish with a charming smile. ‘There was no need to have stayed away for me.’ ‘Now, Peter,’ said Jennie ‘that’s rude after Hamish has been so nice.’ ‘We ought to saw some logs’ said Hamish ‘Would you like to give a hand?’ ‘Oh yes do let’s’ said Jennie ‘You and Peter can take the double saw, and I’ll do the small branches.’

  Peter did not find it very easy to keep up to Hamish’s pace, he got very hot and out of breath, the sawdust kept flying in his face and the teeth of the saw stuck suddenly in the knots of wood so that they were both violently jolted. ‘I say’ said Hamish ‘I don’t think you’re very good at this. Perhaps we’d better stop.’ ‘No’ said Jennie who was angry at Peter’s inefficiency ‘Certainly not, it does Peter good to do things he’s not good at.’ Peter immediately let go off his end of the saw so that it swung sharply round almost cutting off Hamish’s arm. ‘Bloody Hell’ said Hamish, but Peter took no notice, he strode rapidly away down the path through the little copse. Jennie ran after him. ‘Good Heavens, Peter’ she called ‘Whatever is the matter? Don’t be such an idiot. Just because I said it was good for you to go on sawing and so it would have been.’ ‘It’s a great deal more than that’ said Peter tensely ‘as you’d see if you weren’t blind with love of your family.’ ‘Darling, what has upset you? Surely you aren’t annoyed with Hamish, why he’s only a child.’ ‘I’m well aware of that’ said Peter ‘a vain, spoilt child to be petted and fussed one minute and bullied and ordered about the next. And your father’s just as bad. Well I don’t want a lot of women petting and bullying me, not Nan, nor your beloved Flopsy, no nor even you.’ ‘Peter you’re crazy.’ ‘Good God! I’m only trying to live up to your family. I’ve had it ever since I arrived “The Crazy Cockshotts” and bloody proud of it. I’ve had it from you and your father, from Flopsy and from Nan, wretched woman she ought to know all about it, and I’ve had it from your Fascist brother. You’re all a damned sight too crazy for me to live up to.’ Jennie was getting quite out of breath, trying to keep up with Peter’s increasing pace. Suddenly she flung herself down in the thick bracken at the side of the path. ‘Stop! Peter, stop!’ she called. Peter stood still over her and she stretched out her hand to him, pulling him down on top of her. Her mouth pressed tightly to his, and her hands stroked his hair, his arms, his back, soothing and caressing him. Gradually his anger died from him and the tension relaxed as in his turn he held her to him.

  A VISIT IN BAD TASTE

  ‘HE looks very much older’ said Margaret. ‘It’s aged him dreadfully and made him servile.’

  ‘I should imagine that prison does tend to kill one’s independence’ said her husband drily.

  ‘Oh yes that’s all very well, Malcolm, you can afford to be rational, to explain away, to account for. But he’s my brother and no amount of reasons can make it any better to have him sitting there fingering his tie when he talks, loosening his collar with his finger, deferring every opinion to you, calling old Colonel Gordon sir, jumping up with every move I make. It’s like a rather pathetic minor public schoolboy of nineteen applying for a job, and he’s sixty, Malcolm, remember that – sixty.’

  ‘I think you know’ said Malcolm Tarrant, as he replaced his glass of port on the little table by his side ‘that public school has always meant a lot more to Arthur than we can quite understand. The only time that I visited him in Tam-caster I was struck by the importance that they all attached to it. As a bank manager there and a worthy citizen of the town it was in some kind of way a passport to power, not just the place you’d been at school at. And now, I imagine, it’s assumed an importance out of all perspective, a kind of lifebuoy to a drowning sailor. We’re inclined to imagine prison as peopled with public schoolboys, each with a toothbrush moustache and an assumed military rank, “ex-public schoolboy gaoled,” but they only make so much of it because it’s so unusuaL God knows what sort of awful snobbery the presence of a “public schoolman” arouses among the old lags, or the warders too for that matter – people speak so often of the horrors of War but they never mention the most awful of them – the mind of the non-commissioned officer. Depend upon it, whatever snobbery there was, Arthur got full benefit from it.’

  Margaret’s deep, black eyes showed no sign of her distress, only her long upper lip stiffened and the tapir’s nose that would have done credit to an Edward Lear drawing showed more white. The firelight shone upon her rich silver brocade evening dress as she rustled and shimmered across the room to place a log on the great open fire. She put the tiny liqueur glass of light emerald – how Malcolm always laughed at her feminine taste for crême de menthe! – upon the mantelpiece between the Chelsea group of Silenus and a country girl and the plain grey bowl filled with coppery and red-gold chrysanthemums.

  ‘If you mean that Arthur is vulgar’ she cried ‘always has been, yes, yes. At least, not always’ and her thin lips, so faintly rouged, relaxed into tenderness ‘not when we were children. But increasingly so. My dear, how could I think otherwise, married to that terrible little woman. – “How do you keep the servants from thieving, Margaret?” – “Give that class an inch and they’ll take an ell” – dreadful, vulgar little Fascist-minded creature.’

  ‘Dear Margaret’ said Malcolm, and he smiled the special smile of admiring condescension that he kept for his wife’s political opinions. ‘Remember that in Myra’s eyes you were a terrible Red.’

  ‘It isn’t a question of politics, Malcolm’ said his wife and she frowned – to her husband she was once again the serious-minded, simple student he had found so irresistible at Cambridge nearly forty years ago. ‘It’s a question of taste. No, it was a terrible marriage and a terrible life. It was the one excuse I could make for him at the time. To have lived for so many years against such a background was excuse enough for any crime, yes, even that one. I felt it all through the trial as I sat and watched Myra being the injured wife, with that ghastly family round her.’

  ‘That’s where we differ’ said Malcolm and for a moment his handsome, high-cheekboned face with its Roman nose showed all his Covenanting ancestry ‘I could never excuse his actions. I tried to rid myself of prejudice against them, to see him as a sick man rather than as a criminal’ it was not for nothing one felt that the progressive weeklies were so neatly piled on the table beside him ‘but when he refused psychiatric treatment the whole thing became impossible.’

  Margaret smiled at her husband maternally as she speared a crystallized orange from its wooden box with the little two pronged fork. ‘It must be wonderful to have everthing all cut and dried like you, darling’ she said ‘only people don’t fit into pigeon holes according to the demands of reason. Arthur would never go to a psychoanalyst, you old goose; in the first place he thinks it isn’t respectable, and then deep down, of course, he would be frightened of it, he would think it was witchcraft.’

  ‘No doubt you’re right. No doubt Arthur does still live in the Middle Ages’ he moved his cigar dexterously so that the long grey ash fell into the ashtray rather than on to his suit, he narrowed his eyes ‘I still find his actions disgusting, inexcusable.’

  ‘Offences against children’ said Margaret and she spoke the phrase in inverted commas, contemptuously ‘I suppose there is no woman whose blood does not get heated when she reads that in the newspaper. But somehow it all seemed so different when I saw it at the trial. Arthur seemed so shrunken and small, so curiously remote for the principal actor, as though he’d done it all inadvertently. He pro
bably had, too,’ she added fiercely, striking the arm of her chair with her hand ‘in order to forget that dreadful, bright woman – that awful, chromium-plated, cocktail-cabinet, old-oak-lounge home. And then those ghastly people – the parents – there are some kinds of working class people I just cannot take – servile and defiant, obstinate and shifty. I believe every word Arthur said when he told of their menaces, their sudden visits, their demands for money. Oh! they’d had their pound of flesh all right’ she said bitterly ‘in unhappiness and fear. Even the children, Malcolm, it sounds so moving in the abstract, poor little creatures not comprehending, their whole lives distorted by a single incident. When Rupert and Jane were little, I used to think that if anyone harmed them I would put his eyes out with hot irons. But these children weren’t like that – that cretinous boy with the sudden look of cunning in his eyes and that awful, painted, oversexed girl.’

  ‘It’s a pity you ever went to the trial’ said Malcolm, but Margaret could not agree. ‘I had to suffer it all’ she cried ‘it was the only way. But that Dostoyevskeyan mood is over. I don’t want any more of it, I want it to be finished.’ She fitted a cigarette into one of the little cardboard holders that stood in a glass jar on her work-table, then suddenly she turned on her husband fiercely ‘Why has he come here? Why? Why?’ she cried.

  ‘I imagine because he’s lonely’ said Malcolm.

  ‘Of course he is. What can be expected? But he’ll be just as lonely here. We aren’t his sort of people, Malcolm. Oh! Not just because of what’s happened, we never have been. This isn’t his kind of house.’ She thought with pleasure of all they had built up there – the taste, the tolerance, the ease of living, the lack of dogmatism. Her eyes lighted on the Chelsea and the Meissen figures, the John drawings, the Spanish metal-work, the little pale yellow spinet – eclectic but good. Her ears heard once more Ralph Tarrant telling them of his ideas for Hamlet, Mrs Doyle speaking of her life with the great man, Professor Crewe describing his theory of obsolete ideas, Dr Modjka his terrible meeting with Hitler. Arthur had no place there.

  ‘You want me to ask him to go’ said Malcolm slowly. Margaret bent over the fire, crouching on a stool in the hearth, holding out her hands to the warmth. ‘Yes’ she said in a low voice ‘I do.’ ‘Before he’s found his feet?’ Malcolm was puzzled. ‘He knows I think that he must move eventually, but for the moment …’ ‘The moment!’ broke in Margaret savagely. ‘If he stays now he stays for ever, I’m as certain of that as that I stand. Don’t ask me how I know, but I do.’ ‘Ah! well. It won’t be a very pleasant talk’ said her husband ‘but perhaps it will be for the best.’

  Only the frou-frou of Margaret’s skirt broke the silence as she moved about the room, rearranging the sprigs of winter jasmine, drawing the heavy striped satin curtains across to cover a crack of light. Suddenly she sat down again on the stool and began to unwrap some sewing from a little silk bundle.

  ‘I think the last chapter of Walter’s book very pretentious’ she said in a voice harder and clearer than normal. ‘He’s at his worst when he’s doing the great Panjandrum.’

  ‘Poor Walter’ said Malcolm ‘You can’t go on playing Peter Pan and speak with the voice of authority …’

  They had not long been talking, when Arthur came in. His suit looked over-pressed, his tie was too ‘club’, his hair had too much brilliantine for a man of his age. All his actions were carried out overconsciously, with military precision; as he sat down he jerked up his trousers to preserve the crease, he removed a white handkerchief from his shirtcuff, wiped his little toothbrush moustache and cleared his throat – ‘Sorry to have been so long’ he said ‘Nature’s call, you know’. Malcolm smiled wryly and Margaret winced.

  ‘You don’t take sugar, do you Arthur?’ she said as she handed him his coffee.

  ‘Will you have a glass of port, old man?’ asked Malcolm, adapting his phraseology to his brother-in-law.

  ‘Oh! thanks very much’ said Arthur in quick, nervous tones, fingering his collar. Then feeling that such diffidence was unsuitable, he added ‘Port, eh? Very fruity, very tasty.’

  There was a long pause, then Margaret and Malcolm spoke at once.

  ‘I’ve just been saying that Walter Howard’s new book …’ she began.

  ‘Did you have an opportunity to look at the trees we’ve planted?’ said Malcolm. Then, as Margaret, blushing, turned her head away, he continued ‘We ought really to have more trees down, if this fuel shortage is going to materialize. I’ll get Bow on to Bowers about it.’

  ‘Oh not this week, darling’ said Margaret ‘Mrs Bowers is away with her mother who’s ill and young Peter’s got flu. Poor Bowers is terribly overworked.’

  ‘Next week then’ said Malcolm ‘I must say I’ve never known such a set for illness.’

  ‘Give them an inch and they’ll take an ell’ said Arthur.

  The reiteration of her sister-in-law’s phrase enraged Margaret. ‘What nonsense you do talk, Arthur’ she cried. ‘I should have thought the last few months would have taught you some sense.’ She blushed scarlet as she realized what she had said, then more gently she added ‘You don’t know the Bowers. Why Mrs Bowers is the best friend I have round here.’

  Arthur felt the old order was on its mettle, he was not prepared to be placated. ‘I’m afraid my respect for your precious British workmen has not been increased where I come from’ he said defiantly.

  ‘I doubt if you saw the British workman at his best in prison’ said Malcolm carefully, and as his brother-in-law was about to continue the argument, he added ‘No, Arthur, let’s leave it at that – Margaret and I have our own ideas on these things and we’re too old to change them now.’

  Arthur’s defiance vanished. He fingered the knot of his tie and mumbled something about ‘respecting them for it’. There was a silence for some minutes, then Malcolm said abruptly ‘Where do you plan to go from here?’ Arthur was understood to say that he hadn’t thought about it.

  ‘I think you should’ said Malcolm ‘Why don’t you go abroad?’

  ‘The Colonies?’ questioned Arthur with a little laugh.

  ‘I know it’s conventional, but why not? You can always count on me if you need any money.’

  Arthur did not speak for a moment. Then ‘You want me to go from here?’ he asked. Margaret was determined to fight her own battle, so ‘Yes, Arthur’ she replied ‘You must. It won’t do here, we don’t fit in together.’

  ‘I doubt if I fit in anywhere’ Arthur’s voice was bitter.

  Malcolm would have dispelled the mood with a ‘nonsense, old man,’ but Margaret again took up the task. ‘No, Malcolm, perhaps he’s right’ suddenly her voice became far away, with a dramatic note. ‘When Malcolm was at the Ministry in London during the raids and Rupert was flying over Germany, I had to realize that they might both be killed and then, of course I wouldn’t have fitted in. I took my precautions. I always carried something that would finish me off quickly if I needed it. Remember, Arthur, if anything should happen I shall always understand and respect you.’

  Malcolm looked away, embarrassed. These moments of self-dramatization of Margaret’s made him feel that he had married beneath him.

  Arthur sat, thinking – the colonies or suicide, neither seemed to be what he was needing.

  ‘Well’ he said finally ‘I’m very tired, I’ll be toddling off to bed, I think. A real long night’ll do me good.’

  Margaret got up and stroked his hair.

  ‘Ee,’ he said ‘it’s a moocky do, lass, as Nurse used to say.’

  This direct appeal to sentiment repelled her ‘You’ll find whisky and a syphon in your room’ she said formally.

  ‘Yes, have a good nightcap’ said Malcolm to the erect over-military back of his brother-in-law.

  ‘Thank God that’s over’ he sighed a few minutes later. ‘Poor old Arthur. I expect he’ll find happiness sometime, somewhere.’

  ‘No, Malcolm’ said Margaret fiercely ‘it’s been an unpleasant business
, but if it’s not to turn sour on us, we’ve got to face it. Arthur will never be happy, he’s rotten, dead. But we aren’t, and if we’re going to live, we can’t afford to let his rottenness infect us.’

  Malcolm stared at his wife with admiration – to face reality, that was obviously the way to meet these things, not to try to escape. He thought for a few minutes of what she had said – of Arthur’s rottenness – socially and personally – and of all that they stood for – individually alive, socially progressive. But for all the realism of her view, it somehow did not satisfy him. He remained vaguely uneasy the whole evening.

  RASPBERRY JAM

  ‘HOW are your funny friends at Potter’s Farm, Johnnie?’ asked his aunt from London.

  ‘Very well, thank you, Aunt Eva’ said the little boy in the window in a high prim voice. He had been drawing faces on his bare knee and now put down the indelible pencil. The moment that he had been dreading all day had arrived. Now they would probe and probe with their silly questions and the whole story of that dreadful tea party with his old friends would come tumbling out. There would be scenes and abuse and the old ladies would be made to suffer further. This he could not bear, for although he never wanted to see them again and had come, in brooding over the afternoon’s events, almost to hate them, to bring them further misery, to be the means of their disgrace would be worse than any of the horrible things that had already happened. Apart from his fear of what might follow he did not intend to pursue the conversation himself, for he disliked his aunt’s bright patronizing tone. He knew that she felt ill at ease with children and would soon lapse into that embarrassing ‘leg pulling’ manner which some grown ups used. For himself, he did not mind this but if she made silly jokes about the old ladies at Potter’s Farm he would get angry and then Mummy would say all that about his having to learn to take a joke and about his being highly strung and where could he have got it from, not from her.