by Angus Wilson
‘I believe it was something rather important to Jeremy’ said Alastair.
But Gerald too was rather nettled. ‘Oh! a highly significant experience, I’m sure’ he said ‘Let’s put on I’m No Angel. It’s still quite my favourite Mae West number.’
MOTHER’S SENSE OF FUN
DONALD had awoken at six to hear those sounds of bustle and activity that he knew so well – quick scurryings that sounded like mice in the wainscoting, and hushed, penetrating whispers to Cook. There could be no doubt that his mother was up and about and that she intended to be particularly considerate to him after his journey. Over-long intimacy had invested each sound that she made with a particular significance, so that he soon recognized in the youthful jauntiness of her movements a pleasure in his return that went beyond her usual pride in being up so early. She was being especially thoughtful that he might have no cause for complaint, was laying up indulgence for herself, acquiring merit so that any independence he might claim would appear as ingratitude. No martyr could walk so bravely to her doom, as she to the stake she had built for herself.
Why should these household noises have such an accusing ring? He knew there were no duties that could not be performed later in the day, yet it seemed impossible to believe that in carrying them out so quietly his mother was not having to skimp them or expend extra energy upon them – and all this sacrifice of course was for him.
I am not equal to the fight, he thought bitterly. ‘The contest between Mrs Carrington and her son for the prize of the latter’s independence was an unsatisfactory one to the spectators, for the fight was very unequal. Mrs Carrington, though a veteran in the ring, showed her old undiminished energy, whilst her punch seemed to have lost nothing of its force. Her speed and tactics were completely superior to those of her opponent, who seemed dazed and tired from the start. She sprang from one corner of the ring to another, seeming to be everywhere at once and dealing blows from the most unexpected angles.’ It was all so intensely unfair, he reflected, she had so many virtues and it was exactly those virtues which made life with her impossible. The crowd, too, was so often on her side, so often succumbed to her charm, all but his own few friends, those that she had not appropriated, and they, of course, were ‘impossible’ people. ‘What a wonderful pal your mother must be’ people would say to him ‘so easy going and alive and such a terrific sense of fun.’ It was of course absolutely true. At times she moved and even looked like a young girl, and she could then be a delightful companion, ready to go anywhere at any moment, and investing the most ordinary events with a sense of adventure. Despite her continuous anxieties and frets about household matters, she was ready to leave them aside at a moment’s notice if she could share for a minute in his life. ‘I’m the mistress of the house’ she would say ‘not the house of me.’ Since she rose at six and never retired before midnight she had, as she claimed, plenty of time to get things done. It was the other members of the household who suffered. Looking back, Donald realized that he could not remember leaving a theatre or an evening party without the sick apprehension that he would have to pass an hour or more before he was allowed to sink exhausted into bed. She always had a letter to write on which he could advise or something to finish off in the kitchen if he wouldn’t mind giving a hand, or, in default of other employment, she could bustle about making a last cup of tea, which she would then bring to his bedside. ‘I really think this is my favourite moment of the day’ she would say, sinking into the armchair ‘When we can both relax at last. What an extraordinary hat Olga had on …’ It was of course a nice Bohemian refusal to be dominated by routine, but it meant that they were both always a little overtired, always a little on edge.
As if to emphasize the underlying tension of his life at home, Mrs Carrington’s voice came floating towards him from the room outside, its cheerful metallic timbre striking a chill in him even as he lay in bed. ‘Nonsense, Cook’ she was saying ‘You know very well you like standing in these queues. You take to. them like a duck to water, they’re just up your street.’ It was almost obscene, he decided, that one’s mother should be so like a hospital nurse. It was difficult to decide which of her two voices more completely suggested the private ward. The sweet cooing which she used in moments of intimacy roused greater suspicion in him, for it called so openly for surrender. But his hostility was chiefly reserved for the high pitched jollity of her everyday speech, which, apart from being more aurally revolting, revealed her insensitive and bullying nature. All day long it seemed to shrill about the house in a constant stream of self-satisfied humour and obtuse common sense. The words she employed, too, were surely specially designed to rob the English language of any pretensions to beauty it might possess. It was not exactly that she used outmoded slang like Miss Rutherford who was always ‘unable to care less’ about things or to ‘like them more’, or even the earlier slang of Aunt Nora with her ‘topholes’ and ‘purple limits’. He had often thought that to find his mother’s phrases one would have to go to English translations of opera or the French and German prose books that he had used at school. It always ‘rained cats and dogs’, that is if the rain did not ‘look like holding off’; Alice Stockfield ‘was a bit down in the mouth’ but then she ‘let things get on top of her’; Roger Grant was ‘certainly no Adonis’, but she had ‘an awfully soft spot in her heart for him’. At the end of a tiring day he would often wait for one of these familiar phrases in an agony of apprehension that he feared to betray, for he knew that criticism would be met by wounded silence or the slow, crushing steam-roller of her banter, the terrible levelling force of her sense of humour. She and Cook were having a ‘good old laugh’ at that very moment. ‘Well I suppose we must have looked rather silly, ma’am’ he could hear Cook saying. ‘Of course we did’ his mother replied ‘You standing there with flour all over your face and me in that terrible old green dress and in front of us on the floor – a pudding. Didn’t you notice his face? I’ve no doubt at all that when he got home to dinner that night at Surbiton or wherever inspectors of taxes live he told his wife that he’d seen a couple of lunatics – and of course we are completely crazy in this household.’
The same cosy, family jokes, he thought, the same satisfaction with her own little world. The difficulty was that in attacking her in this way one felt so grossly unfair. If she had been someone else’s mother one would have felt differently. She had an eye for the ridiculous that was all penetrating, and, in a great degree, that rarer quality, a sense of fun, so that he seldom went anywhere with her without having, what she so delighted in, ‘a good laugh’. ‘That rare gift in a woman’ Major Ashley had called it ‘the ability to laugh at herself.’ And it was quite true – on occasion she would even mock the very jargon in her speech which he criticized; ‘So I said to him in my bright, jolly way’ she would say. But the self-satisfaction with which she laughed at herself, thought Donald bitterly! There was never any real self-criticism in her humour. No, the criticism was reserved for everything else – the ideas she could not understand, the beauty she could not see, the feelings she could not appreciate. Heaven preserve me from the laugh of a really good woman, he said aloud.
As if to mock his mood the laughter and conversation outside his room grew louder. It was clear that the period of respite granted to him was approaching its end. Soon she would fill the room with that proud sense of possession of which her early morning embrace was almost a symbol. As he looked round the bedroom he realized how much he hated it. The careful, dead good taste of its furnishing bore the imprint of her withering hand. Yet how much she delighted in emphasizing that it was his room – ‘Donald’s part of the world’. She would be longing to emphasize his return to it, waiting for him to say how happy he was to be back there – well she would have to say it for him. Nothing nauseated him more than this pretence that he enjoyed a separate establishment. It was a primary article of the household creed which she reiterated every day that ‘civilized people could not live on top of each other’, ‘eve
ryone must have his own little place where he could do what he liked’. As long as he could remember she had fostered the belief in him that his room was his private domain, only it would seem to create stress by her constant invasion of it. The very fiction of independence itself had been used as a weapon against him, when as a boy he had resisted her claims – ‘Remember, Donald’ she had declared ‘I’m only a visitor here and visitors should be treated with some semblance of good manners’.
At times he fancied the room as a battlefield littered with the skulls and skeletons of his past hopes. It brought before him a series of ever more dispiriting pictures – sick beds surrounded by cloying and fussy affection; nursery teas when his every private fantasy and ambition had been taken out, laughed at, and put away with the nonsense knocked out of it; adolescent hours of study and dreams riddled through and through with nagging and banter and summons to petty errands: over twenty years now, of nauseating futility. Over these years there had grown up between him and his mother a thickly woven web of companionship and antipathy, and beneath that an inner web of love and hatred. As time passed the antipathy and hatred had grown paramount, as she gradually coiled round his life, breaking his moral fibre, softening and pulping so that at the last she could swallow him. ‘The Nightmare Life in Death is she’ he quoted ‘that thicks man’s blood with cold.’
The kiss with which his mother greeted him as she brought in the breakfast tray was brisk and businesslike, the sting lay in the gesture with which she followed it – the stroking and rumpling of his hair. The same routine had persisted since his thirteenth year, he could almost hear her say the words he had known so well in his schooldays ‘We’re a bit too old for kisses now, aren’t we darling? But we’re still mummy’s boy.’ This morning he could see that she was hungry for some demonstration of the affection she had missed during his six months’ absence; well, as far as he was concerned it should be a struggle à l’outrance.
‘I hope you’re quite rested, darling’ said Mrs Carrington ‘because you’ll have to nerve yourself for a heart to heart with Cook. Only wild horses or a fond mother’s love could have prevented her from waking you up hours ago.’ Donald made no answer, but lay back with his head on the pillow and his eyes closed, he was determined to show no sign of appreciation, determined to express no pleasure at being home once more. He watched his mother as she moved quietly but briskly about, settling his clothes and books with the businesslike reverence of a modern Martha. A ray of sunshine from the window picked out her neat grey shingled head – she had always refused to succumb to the more fashionable bleached hair for she felt that white gave such a hard line to the face – outlined the bright, birdlike features with their pastel colouring of powder and faint rouge upon the cheeks – lipstick was all right for young girls, she would say, but not for old women like her. She looked like a robin, he decided, that had come in for warmth from the Christmas card snow scene outside as she hopped from object to object, folding her son’s ties, rearranging the Christmas roses in the pewter mug on the mantelpiece; her bright quizzical eyes and her jolly little smile, her well-cut grey woollen costume and her crimson silk blouse all helped to enhance the picture. ‘Look’, she seemed to say, ‘I’m really rather wonderful for fifty-eight, so cheerful, almost “cheeky”, of course life hasn’t been easy and it’s taken a lot of pluck to keep going,’ and then if you liked robins on Christmas cards you would be filled with the requisite warmth towards her, would surrender to the appeal for protection and make a place for her by your fireside.
And if you did, he thought, you would be lost. No, it was on quite other things that you must concentrate if you were to save your soul alive. The brave humorous little smile was there, but the underlip stuck out in a discontented babyish pout, the blue eyes shone brightly but they shone with the hard light of egotism; above all the lines that ran down from her cheeks were lines of self-pity. It was true that he had left the liner at Southampton yesterday with mixed feelings, but had not guessed how soon the old misery would descend upon him. It had only taken one evening in her company to realize what ‘home’ and ‘Mother’ meant to him, shades of the prison house had indeed begun to close around the growing boy, and the horror of it was, he reflected, that it was not even as if he was a growing boy, he was twenty-five, an old ‘lag’. The six months lecture tour in America had been his first escape since University days. When he was over there it had seemed as though he was free at last, but of course he had really only been a ticket of leave man. America, in any case, was a thing of the past, – that she had made clear to him in their conversation of the night before. ‘Well’ she had said with half humorous patronage ‘they seem to be very much like other foreigners. Perfectly easy to get on with, so long as you remember that you are dealing with children. They don’t sound as sensible as the French, but at any rate they’re not so pompous as the Germans. Quite frankly I’m afraid the trouble with them is that they’re all really rather common.’ It wasn’t a period of his life she had shared in and the sooner it was forgotten the better. She had not done with the subject, he noticed, as he tried not to hear the comments she made whilst tidying his clothes.
‘I hope you like the Christmas roses, I had almost to sell the family diamonds to buy them, but there, I’m forgetting they’re probably two a penny in New York.’ ‘You don’t imagine you’re going to wear this terrible American tie, do you, darling? Unless you intend to take me to a guest night at the Ancient Order of Buffaloes. Somehow I don’t think we’d fit in very well.’ ‘Gracious! how old-fashioned they must be over there, all those naked girls on magazine covers! Why it’s just the sort of thing your great Uncle Tom used to hide in the desk in the billiard room.’ God! why must she protract the agony like this? thought Donald. If she wanted to remove his self reliance from him, let her wheel him into the operating theatre and get it over with, let him at least be spared this bright sick room talk, these preliminary flashes of the surgeon’s scalpel. At last Mrs Carrington herself grew impatient of skirmishing – ‘Your room hasn’t changed much, darling, has it’ she asked in a voice yearning for affection. ‘The room hasn’t changed at all’ he answered flatly, and as he said it he was sucked down by tiredness at the truth of the statement. Nothing had changed, all the illusions he had built up in his absence, all his beliefs in new powers of defence faded before the persistence of her attack. He could see before him the outline of the coming week – the week of holiday before returning to the office on which he had counted so much as a preparation for a new life of independence. There would be successes for her when boring relatives came to the house, when they visited Aunt Nora at Richmond or when she showed off his tricks before friends she had made in his absence; there would be Pyrrhic victories for him when his friends came to the house and she gently but humorously put them out of their ease; there would be truces when he shopped with her at Harrod’s, lunched with her at her club or accompanied her to the family solicitor; there would undoubtedly be at least one major conflict with loss of temper and tears and sulking; and, at last, he would return to work, broken in and trained to carry on life at home.
Some weeks later, Donald lay back in bed, luxuriating in the pleasure of a sleep already closing upon him at the early hour of half past ten. How strangely exact his forecast of that week had been, save for one major event! Yes, he thought, one must still call it a major event, though perhaps in a few months or even weeks, it would no longer be ‘major’, for one must recognize the strange tricks of human memory and affection – not that he would have called himself cynical, only that time had taught him to be a realist. Yes, it had been a most typical week, almost a symbol of his whole relationship with his mother.
First there had been the meeting with Alec. How she must have resented his imposing Alec upon her in that first week at home. How typical of his own subservience, he reflected bitterly, that he had told her of meeting his friend at all. There were certain of his friends of whom she had never approved and Alec Lovat was one of t
hem. A clever Scottish Secondary school boy was not the sort of Cambridge friend she had imagined for him, and their common literary enthusiasms, in which she could not share, did not improve the situation. She had been so very eager to make this shy and angular youth feel at home, but his lack of response had not been encouraging; he persisted in remaining her son’s friend and not hers. He recalled the little frown of displeasure with which she had heard of the meeting. ‘Alec!’ she had said ‘well, that is jolly. I expect he’s changed a lot, the army’s probably knocked most of the corners off him. He could be so nice when he forgot for a moment that he’d worked his way up from the bottom. He was so very proud of his childish opinions and so very ashamed of his delightful Scots accent.’
‘The Scots accent’s quite disappeared now’ he had told her. ‘Gracious me’ she had said ‘then he must certainly be laughed back into it.’
When the telephone rang that evening she had run to answer it. ‘But, of course, you must come’ he had heard her say, and a moment later ‘Och! but what ha’e ye done wi’ your gude Scots tongue? I hope ye no ha’e left it in Eetaly.’
She had chosen to invite a young French girl to meet Alec at dinner. She had a great liking for the dead conventionality and empty chic of French middle class women and this girl had been a superb specimen of her kind. The evening had not been a success. Poor Alec’s shyness had only vanished for a moment when he began to speak of his new-found enthusiasm for the Early Wordsworth. ‘It’s all nonsense’ he had said excitedly ‘to expect the Prelude without that first attempt at a new freshness. Some of it’s absurd if you like …’ ‘Now you’re very naughty, Alec’ broke in Mrs Carrington ‘I know you’re only pulling our legs, but gracious me, you’ll have Mademoiselle Planquet thinking you mean it. Remember the dignity you have to uphold as the first real live Professor of English she’s ever met.’ When Alec protested his sincerity, she laughed a little and then said abruptly ‘Fiddlesticks, why l suppose you’ll be telling me next that “The Idiot Boy” is the finest poem in the English language. I expect just the same nonsense goes on in France, Mademoiselle Planquet. As soon as we’ve got one stuffy old writer put safely away in the cupboard, these ridiculous children have to fish him out and dust him up again. They haven’t got enough to do, that’s the trouble.’
