Twenty-five years of hunger and war
And they call it a glorious Jubilee.
Inland Hallowby was also looking forward to the Jubilee. The school was rehearsing a curtailed version of Purcell’s King Arthur‚ with Mary Semple, now home from her finishing school, coming on in a chariot to sing ‘Fairest Isle’. There was to be folk dancing by Scouts and Guides, a tea for the old people, a fancy-dress procession; and to mark the occasion Mr. Harvey, J.P.‚ one of the school governors, had presented the Beelby Museum with a pair of buckskin breeches worn by the Duke of Wellington on the field of Talavera. ‘I shall be expected to make a speech about them,’ groaned Justin. ‘I think I shall hire a deputy and go away for the day.’
Celia jumped at this. ‘We’ll both go away. Not just for the day but for a fortnight. We’ll go to Jersey, because you must attend the Jubilee celebrations on your native island—a family obligation. Representative of one of the oldest families. And if we find the same sort of fuss going on there, we can nip over to France in the Escudiers’ boat and be quit of the whole thing. It’s foolproof, it’s perfect. The only thing needed to make it perfectly perfect is to make it a month. Justin, it’s the answer.’ She felt indeed that it was the answer. For some time now, Justin had seemed distrait and out of humour. Afraid he was unwell, she told herself he was stale and knew that he had been neglected. An escapade would put all right. Talavera had not been fought in vain. But she couldn’t get him to consent. She was still persuading when the first letter arrived. It was typed and had been posted in Hallowby. It was unsigned, and began, ‘Hag.’
Reading what followed, Celia tried to hold on to her first impression that the writer was some person in Hallowby juxta Mare. ‘You think you’re sitting pretty, don’t you? You think no one has found you out.’ She had made many enemies there; this must come from one of them. Several times she had been accused of misappropriating funds. Yes, that was it: ‘… and keep such a tight hold on him.’ But why him? It was as though two letters lay on the flimsy page—the letter she was bent on reading and the letter that lay beneath and glared through it. It was a letter about her relations with Justin that she tore into bits and dropped in the wastepaper basket as he came down to breakfast.
She could hardly contain her impatience to get the bits out again, stick them on a backing sheet, make sure. Nothing is ever quite what it first was; the letter was viler, but it was also feebler. It struck her as amateurish.
The letter that came two days later was equally vile but better composed; the writer must be getting his or her hand in. A third was positively elegant. Vexatiously, there was no hint of a demand for hush money. Had there been, Celia could have called in the police, who would have set those ritual springes into which blackmailers—at any rate, blackmailers one reads of in newspapers—walk so artlessly. But the letters did not blackmail, did not even threaten. They stated that what the writer knew was common knowledge. After two letters, one on the heels of the other, which taunted Celia with being ugly, ageing and sexually ridiculous—letters that ripped through her self-control and made her cry with mortification—the writer returned to the theme of common knowledge and concluded with an ‘It may interest you to hear that the following know all about your loathsome performances’ and a list of half a dozen Hallowby names. Further letters laconically listed more names. From the outset, Celia had decided to keep all this to herself, and still held to the decision; but she hoped she wouldn’t begin to talk in her sleep. There was less chance of this, as by now she was sleeping scarcely at all.
It was a Sunday morning and she and Justin were spraying roses for green-fly when Justin said, ‘Puss, what are you concealing?’ She syringed Mme. Alfred Carrière so violently that the jet bowed the rose, went beyond it, and deluged a robin. Justin took the syringe out of her hand and repeated the question.
Looking at him, she saw his face was drawn with woe. ‘No, no, it’s nothing like that,’ she exclaimed. ‘I’m perfectly well. It’s just that some poison-pen imbecile …’
When he had read through the letters, he said thoughtfully, ‘I’d like to wring that little bitch’s neck.’
‘Yes, it is some woman or other, isn’t it? I felt sure of that.’
‘Some woman or other? It’s Mary Semple.’
‘That pretty little Mary Semple?’
‘That pretty little Mary Semple. Give me the letters. I’ll soon settle her.’ He looked at his watch. ‘No, I can’t settle her yet. She’ll still be in church.’
‘But I don’t understand why.’
‘You do, really.’
‘Justin! Have you been carrying on with Mary Semple?’
‘No, I wouldn’t say that. She’s got white eyelashes. But ever since she came home Mary Semple has been doing all she could to carry on with me. There I was in the Beelby, you see, like a bull at the stake. No one comes near the place now; I was at her mercy. And in she tripped, and talked about the old days, telling me her little troubles, showing me poems, pitying me for my hard lot. I tried to cool her down, I tried to taper it off. But she was bent on rape, and one morning I lost all patience, told her she bored me and that if she came again I’d empty the fire bucket over her. She wept and wailed, and I paid no attention, and when there was silence I looked cautiously round and she was gone. And a day or so after’—he looked at the mended letter—‘yes, a couple of days after, she sat her down to take it out of you.’
‘But, Justin—how did she know about us?’
‘No fire without smoke, I suppose. I dare say she overheard her parents cheering each other along the way with Christian surmises. Anyhow, children nowadays are brought up on that sort of useful knowledge.’
‘No fire without smoke,’ she repeated. ‘And what about those lists?’
‘Put in to make your flesh creep, most likely. Even if they do know, they weren’t informed at a public meeting. Respectable individuals are too wary about libel and slander to raise their respectable voices individually. It’s like that motet Pendarves used to talk about, when he could never manage to get them all there at once. Extraordinary ambitions people have! Fancy wanting to hear forty singers simultaneously yelling different tunes.’
‘It can be done. There was a performance at Newcastle—he was dead by then. But, Justin——’
‘That will do, Celia. I am now going off to settle Mary Semple.’
‘How will you manage to see her alone?’
‘I shall enter her father’s dwelling. Mary will manage the rest.’
The savagery of these last words frightened her. She had not heard that note in his voice since he cried out in his sleep. She watched him limp from the room as though she were watching an incalculable stranger. A moment later he reappeared, took her hand, and kissed it. ‘Don’t worry, Puss. If need be, we’ll fly the country.’
Whatever danger might lie ahead, it was the thought of the danger escaped that made her tremble. If she had gone on concealing those letters—and she had considered it her right and duty to do so—a wedge would have been driven between her and Justin, bruising the tissue of their love, invisibly fissuring them, as a wedge of ice does in the living tree. And thus a scandal about their incest would have found them without any spontaneity of reaction and distracted by the discovery of how long she had been arrogating to herself a thing that concerned them both. ‘Here and now,’ she exclaimed, ‘I give up being an elder sister who knows best.’ Justin, on his way to the Semples’, was muttering to himself, ‘Damn and blast it, why couldn’t she have told me sooner? If she had it would all be over by now.’ It did not occur to him to blame himself for a lack of openness. This did not occur to Celia, either. It was Justin’s constancy that mattered, not his fidelity—which was his own business.
When he reappeared, washed and brushed and ready for lunch, and told her there would be no more billets-doux from Mary, it was with merely tactical curiosity that she asked, ‘Did you have to bribe her?’ And as he did not answer at once, she went on to ask, ‘
Would you like potted shrimps or mulligatawny? There’s both.’
They did not have to fly the country. Mary Semple disposed of the rest of her feelings by quarrelling with everyone in the cast of King Arthur and singing ‘Fairest Isle’ with such venom that her hearers felt their blood run cold, and afterwards remarked that stage fright had made her sing out of tune. The people listed by Mary as cognizant showed no more interest in the Tizards than before. The tradesmen continued to deliver. Not a cold shoulder was turned. But on that Sunday morning the balance between Justin and Celia had shifted, and never returned to its former adjustment. Both of them were aware of this, so neither of them referred to it, though at first Celia’s abdication made her rather insistent that Justin should know best, make decisions, assert his authority. Justin asserted his authority by knowing what decisions could be postponed till the moment when there was no need to make them at all. Though he did not dislike responsibility, he was not going to be a slave to it. Celia’s abdication also released elements in her character which till then had been penned back by her habit of common sense and efficiency. She became slightly frivolous, forgetful and timid. She read novels before lunch, abandoned all social conscience about bores, mislaid bills, took second helpings of risotto and mashed potatoes and began to put on weight. She lost her aplomb as a driver and had one or two small accidents. She discovered the delights of needing to be taken away for pick-me-up holidays. Mrs. Mugthwaite, observing all this, knew it was the Change, and felt sorry for poor Mr. Tizard; the Change wasn’t a thing that a brother should be expected to deal with. From time to time, Justin and Celia discussed leaving Hallowby and going to live somewhere away from the east-coast climate and the east wind at the corner by St. Cuthbert’s, but they put off moving, because the two animals had grown old, were set in their ways, and would be happier dying in their own home. The pug died just before the Munich crisis, the cat lived on into the war.
So did Mr. Pilkington, who died from overwork two months before the first air raid on Hallowby juxta Mare justified his insistence on constructing an air-raid shelter under the school playing fields. This first raid was concentrated on the ironworks, and did considerable damage. All next day, inland Hallowby heard the growl of demolition explosives. In the second raid, the defences were better organized. The enemy bombers were driven off their target before they could finish their mission. Two were brought down out to sea. A third, twisting inland, jettisoned its remaining bombs on and around Hallowby. One dropped in Gas Lane, another just across the road from Newton Lodge. The blast brought down the roof and dislodged a chimney stack. The rescue workers, turning the light of their torches here and there, noting the usual disparities between the havocked and the unharmed, the fireplace blown out, the portrait smiling above it, followed the trail of bricks and rubble upstairs and into a bedroom whose door slanted from its hinges. A cold air met them; looking up, they saw the sky. The floor was deep in rubble; bits of broken masonry, clots of brickwork, stood up from it like rocks on a beach. A dark bulk crouched on the hearth, and was part of the chimney stack, and a torrent of slates had fallen on the bed, crushing the two bodies that lay there.
The wavering torchlights wandered over the spectacle. There was a silence. Then young Foe spoke out. ‘He must have come in to comfort her. That’s my opinion.’ The others concurred. Silently, they disentangled Justin and Celia, and wrapped them in separate tarpaulin sheets. No word of what they had found got out. Foe’s hypothesis was accepted by the coroner and became truth.
SWANS ON AN AUTUMN RIVER
AS he quitted the Aer Lingus plane from Liverpool and set foot for the first time in his life on Irish soil, he was already a disappointed man. He had promised himself a second caress of the stewardess’s leg; but when the jostle of alighting passengers had brought him conveniently close to her she was standing pressed into the doorway, stiff as a ramrod, her shy, innocent looks which had been so particularly attractive changed for coldness and reserve. So there was nothing to be done. He put the intended tip back into his pocket and stepped off the plane a disappointed man. At his age, such disappointments are serious. You are only young once. At the time it seems endless, and is gone in a flash; and then for a very long time you are old.
Meanwhile, here he was, Norman Repton, aged sixty-nine, hearty as ever though overweight, attending a congress of sanitary engineers on behalf of the firm of Ingatestone & Murgatroyd. The invitation had not come to him. It had been handed on by Collins, the chairman of the board of management. ‘You go, Norman. If you’ve never eaten a Dublin steak, you don’t know what life is.’ He had accepted, though as making a favour of it. He did not wish to admit to himself that at the thought of going to Ireland a long-outgrown desire had staggered to its feet. When he was young the notion of Ireland was romance to him. Its hills were bluer, its songs were sweeter. He knew ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ by heart. Later on he had tried to enlist in the Black and Tans. But after all, he could not have wanted to go to Ireland so very much, since he had never gone there.
There were some mountains on the skyline. Their shapes were graceful, but they were not particularly blue. Everywhere else was flattish, calm, dull, unexpectedly neat—though, of course, the pigs and the cabins and the red petticoats would have been expurgated from the vicinity of an airport—and composedly autumnal. A cold wind blew steadily from the west. It was not raining. It was not what he had meant.
Harvey Jessop was not what he had meant, either—that walking encyclopedia of facts and figures, a man whose presence would shrivel any sense of adventure. Nevertheless, recognizing his mincing gait and sloping shoulders among the group of passengers, now some way ahead, Norman Repton quickened his steps, caught up with him, hailed him.
‘Hullo, Jessop! Going to the congress, too?’
‘I didn’t know you were coming.’
It was on the tip of his tongue to retort, ‘Fancy there being anything you didn’t know!’ and at another time he would have said it; but now he did not want to alienate Jessop. With Jessop, one at least knew where one was. One couldn’t be disillusioned in him. At Jessop’s side he went through the customs, answered that he was over on a visit, was wished a pleasant stay. On Jessop’s heels he went out through the glass doors.
‘What about sharing a taxi?’
‘Why? There’s a bus.’
He sat down at Jessop’s side. The bus started. The calm landscape continued. They passed stone walls, then some startingly blue railings. They came into a region of small shops. The names above them were Irish names, with their rollicking associations: Dooley, Murphy, O’Flaherty. Some of the lettering had the classy illegibility he connected with expensive Christmas cards of a pious nature.
‘What on earth does that say? I can’t make head or tail of it.’ Too late, Norman Repton realized that he had done what he had resolved not to do: he had admitted ignorance.
‘Post Office. It’s Erse. Erse is the official language.’
‘Kathleen ni Houlihan, eh?’
Jessop began to speak of the economic drain of printing government forms in two languages. The road sloped downhill. Mountains appeared above the housetops—no doubt the same mountains he had seen from the airport, but suddenly so near, so sharply defined, that it was as though they had sprung up out of an ambush.
‘Good Lord! What are those?’ Norman Repton asked.
‘The Dublin Mountains. They’re quite useful. No worry about water supply.’ They were gone again; the bus ran under a cliff of dark houses with long sashed windows and pillared doorways. The glass in the windows and the fanlights was broken. Here and there a dusky glimmer within showed that a roof was breached.
‘What’s happened to them? Was it a fire?’
‘Tenements,’ replied Jessop. ‘Slums. The rich went, and the poor swarmed in. But soon even the rats will be leaving them.’ He explained, with his facts and figures, how the population of central Dublin had fallen and that of its suburbs increased. ‘That’s where we come in,
Repton. That’s why I’ve come over for this congress. I want to know what’s being done to see if we can’t offer better terms.’
‘You seem to have been making quite a study of it.’
‘Naturally.’
At the bus terminal Jessop was still lecturing. Taking Norman Repton’s arm he walked him past a Morgue and over a wide bridge where gulls were swirling like a snow flurry, talking about suburbs with mysterious names and growing populations demanding modern conveniences.
‘But won’t they smash them, like those windows?’
Jessop laughed. ‘Not our affair, is it? In here.’
During lunch, it seemed increasingly plain that Jessop had designs on Ingatestone & Murgatroyd. A merger would indeed be something for Norman Repton to go back with; he wouldn’t have come to Dublin for nothing. Presently he began to crow from his own dunghill. Crowing and drinking, they forgot the time and arrived twenty minutes late for the opening session. Their entry was frowned at—odd, in a country so notorious for its unpunctuality. But the oddity only glanced across Norman Repton’s mind, for by now he had almost forgotten he was in Ireland. After the session, he asked Jessop to dine with him at his hotel. ‘It’s on Inns Quay, wherever that is.’
‘I know it, I know it. Well, you’ll be able to smell Guinness’s brewery all right, in this wind. Yes, I’ll come with pleasure, but I’ll have to go early, I’ve got to go on somewhere else. You ought to go over Guinness’s. They …’
Suddenly nettled, Norman Repton broke through Jessop’s tale of hogsheads.
‘I can’t make it before seven-forty-five. I’ve got several things to do before then.’
In fact, he had nothing to do except to collect his suitcase from the terminal. This could wait till he had seen something of Dublin. There was that view of the mountains—he liked a good view. As he was again on the north bank of the river, all he need do, even if he could not retrace the way they had come in by, was to nose about for a hill and walk up it.
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