The Cardboard Crown

by Martin Boyd

  In this page of Alice’s diary is a slip of paper on which is written ‘Chopin—Prelude in G. Op. 28’. The handwriting is curious and at first glance suggests that it is not in European characters, but though decorative, it is easy to read. She continues:

  ‘I must learn to play it when I get back. I see that I have unconsciously written “when I get back”. Mr T. then said that we should pay a visit to the Fountain of Trevi, for me to throw in the coin which brings one back to Rome, and which must be thrown in by moonlight. It is only a short distance from his apartment, and as I had brought a simple dark cloak, we agreed to walk. When we came to the fountain we sat on the rough-hewn stones at the side. Behind us giant statues loomed staringly white from the black shadows made by the high moon. The perpetual noise of that silver sheet of falling water made it easier to talk. At times, since I have been in his company, I have felt that our minds are absolutely in accord, that we see everything in the same light. This gives me a sense of security of a kind I have not known before. It was very strong last night. I could not bear the idea of leaving Rome, and in one way Mr T. is Rome to me. I was silent, thinking about this. He must have thought I wanted to return to the hotel, as he stood up and said: “Well, now you must throw in the coin.” I did not move, but said: “Even if I don’t want to leave Rome?” There must have been something in my voice which contained not more than I felt, but more than I wanted to reveal. He started and turning towards me, took both my hands, and exclaimed softly: “Alice!” It is the first time he has called me Alice. At that moment I knew that his feelings for me were the same as mine for him. His voice was so kind. I thought that he was going to make some further gesture, to say something which showed his feelings, but when he had raised me to my feet a kind of diffidence came over him, as if he was not certain how I would receive any declaration. “In any case,” he said, “you had better throw in the coin, to be on the safe side.” He handed me a lire which I tried to throw into the centre basin, but it only fell into the wide pool below, and made a tiny silver splash in the moonlight. We walked back together to the hotel where he left me. When he said goodbye he again kissed my hand, and he gave me a long look into my eyes. I am certain now that I have the choice. He would have spoken tonight but he was taken by surprise. At the next opportunity he will speak. I do not think that I have the power to refuse him. I cannot turn away from a region which, the moment I entered it, I knew was the home of my spirit. This opening to a new world has come at a moment when my old world has utterly failed me, when I found that it had never been mine. I cannot feel that I owe any duty to Austin when he has ignored his to me from the very beginning. The children will be mine. That will have to be arranged. They will be better off here. They will have more opportunities, they will be free from the shameful association with the Dells, and they will not have that restlessness which comes of having two countries, which has been so bad for all of us. I have to deny a whole side of my nature and my life, to end some of my closest friendships if I stay in Europe, but I have to deny my life itself if I leave Rome.’

  And then in tiny writing, not perhaps so that it would be illegible, but to minimise its importance, she wrote:

  ‘Je ne suis pas toute contente.’

  ‘17 October. This morning a letter from Mr Tunstall came up with my breakfast. I knew it was from him because of his writing down for me the number of the Chopin Prelude, and no one else knows that I am here. I thought that he had written what he had hesitated to say by the fountain and my heart beat violently as I opened it. I destroyed it because I could not bear to keep such a souvenir. But I remember every word. He wrote: “I must go away for a while. Do not think it is because my regard for you is any less. It is because it is greater. Rome, my Rome at any rate, would be a drug to you. You are worthy of more nourishing food. I am immune to the drug, or perhaps it is all I can thrive on. Do not stay in Rome, but come back to it. Please forgive me for everything and remember what I told you about the Tunstalls. Do not blame Arthur for Damaris. With all the love of which I am capable, which is great enough to care most for your good, Aubrey.” I have not been out all day. I cannot think.’

  There is a gap of a fortnight before the next entry, which is as follows:

  ‘2 November. We are back at Waterpark. I shall never forget the last two weeks, but I shall write down what happened in case in years to come my memory distorts it. I stayed two days in the hotel in Rome. I could not bear to go out as every street and stone made me think of A. T. Nor could my mind turn in any direction. It was like the suffocation of my spirit, as bad as the day when I discovered about Austin and Hetty. I tried to think of Westhill and the children to heal myself, but my heart was numbed. On the third morning I was in my room, which was still full of the flowers that A. T. had given me. They were wilting but I could not bring myself to throw them away. A waiter came to tell me that a signore was downstairs, asking to see me. I was sure that it was A. T. returned. I did not see how it could be anyone else, as only he knew I was here, excepting a few people like M. de C. who would hardly be likely to call on me without his wife, and in the morning. I was filled with the greatest joy I have ever known, not the deepest or most enduring, but the most sudden and excessive. I went to the looking-glass to see that I was tidy before going down, and I was astonished at the expression of my eyes.

  ‘When I came into the hall I saw not A. T. but Austin. I nearly fainted, but I have never actually fainted. I began to tremble and held onto the bannister of the stairs. He came over to me. He looked dreadfully concerned and ashamed, like a clumsy schoolboy who has broken a very valuable piece of china. The first thought I had that emerged clearly from the tumult in my mind was that all that Austin had done did not matter. It was only a broken vase in a house which remained standing. He did not say anything, or move close to greet me. He was waiting to see how I would receive him. When I had recovered control of my voice and my limbs I led him to a little sitting-room on the right of the hall, which was empty. I asked him how he knew I was here and he said: “He told me.” We talked a little in a formal way, but we both knew that everything was right between us. I asked a few questions about Waterpark, but he said that he had not been there. I was surprised as he had been looking forward so much to the hunting. “Where have you been?” I asked. “In London,” he said. “I’ve been reading for the bar.” When he said this I felt that even the vase was not broken, and at last I burst into tears.

  ‘We left the same day for London, and all the way back I felt as if I were awakening from an extraordinary dream. I could not understand myself—I can not yet—how I could turn round in a few hours from a desperate longing for A. T. to feeling all my old love for Austin as strong as ever. I wonder if there is a looseness in my character which can only be controlled if I cling firmly to my husband, whatever he does. If any other woman had behaved as I have, I should certainly have condemned her. I have not forgotten the dream. How could I? There was an unusual affinity between myself and A. T. We should have recognised it anywhere, but Rome produced the perfect conditions for its acknowledgment, just as a plant will grow in any part of the garden, but there is one particular corner, beneath a sunlit wall, where it will blossom on every branch.’

  They left the following week for Australia, and were back at Westhill in time for Christmas.

  There were certain things which Alice did not explain in her Rome entries, and about which one can only make conjectures. Austin, when she asked him how he knew of her whereabouts, said: ‘He told me.’ Who was ‘he’? Austin arrived in Rome only three days after Aubrey had left, therefore the latter may have written to him before the night by the Fountain of Trevi, probably after Alice had told him of her troubles and he said he could not help her, which suggests that he realised that her only enduring happiness lay in her return to her husband. It is pathetically clear that his feeling for her was not as great as hers for him. She had identified him with the splendour of Rome itself. All the same, when on the night by the fou
ntain he saw that Alice was ready to live with him, or marry him if possible, he wanted to take her, but as he had already written to Austin, saying he should come for her, there was no course open to him but to check his impulse and go away.

  This explanation fits. It is most likely the true one, but there is another. It is possible that Austin’s ‘he’ was not Aubrey, but the hall porter or the concierge, that Austin had learnt Alice’s whereabouts from her bank, and on enquiring at the hotel if she were still there, had been told so by a servant, to whom he referred indifferently as ‘he’. Again, why did Aubrey in his farewell note mention Damaris and Arthur? May his flight have had nothing to do with Austin’s coming, but have been due to his consciousness that ‘the Tunstalls were not good at happy marriages’, at least those three who were the children of Caroline O’Hara? Did he feel in his blood some taint of Teba perversity or Renaissance wickedness which made him unfit to be the lover or husband of anyone as innocent as Alice?

  And yet, when one reads his farewell letter it is impossible to deny that it is slightly nonconformist in tone—so much anxiety for her good, when he was probably just as anxious not to have half-a-dozen Australian children sliding on the marble floors of his palace. Could Renaissance wickedness have a nonconformist tinge, like ‘poetry touched with decency,’ the conception of a Cambridge don?

  I wish that I had asked Arthur what Aubrey was like, but when the former was alive I was hardly aware of the latter’s existence. The Tunstall boys whom I knew at Dilton, were grandsons of Aubrey’s elder half-brother, a very different type, and there seems still to have been a taboo on the subject of the spectacular and scandalous children of Caroline O’Hara. But I had heard a reference to Aubrey which stuck in my mind. I was about sixteen, when a contemporary of his, a rather crusty old neighbour called Colonel Rodgers, was calling on my mother at Waterpark. They were discussing the Tunstalls.

  ‘That Irishwoman’s children were bad hats,’ he said, pretending with the rudeness of old people who exploit their own bad memories, that he had forgotten that my mother was Irish, that one of them was her husband’s aunt, and that they were all her second cousins. ‘What chance had they with those names—Damaris, Aubrey, Ariadne?’ He snorted with contempt. ‘It’s a good thing Aubrey had no children—bringing art into the county. He lived and died in Italy, and we all know that an Englishman Italianate is a devil incarnate!’

  I remembered this so well, because I thought that Damaris, Aubrey and Ariadne were the loveliest names I had ever heard. I thought it would be glorious to bring art into the county, and I immediately conceived the ambition to be an Italianate Englishman.

  8

  Alice’s joy on being reunited to her children at Westhill, according to her diary, exceeded any of the sufficiently strong emotions she experienced in London and Rome, but she makes two adverse comments, one: ‘The house seems very small and overcrowded. Sarah has got the furniture all cluttered in the wrong places.’ The other: ‘Mildred has developed a dreadful voice, whining and nasal. I asked Sarah why she had not corrected it, and she said an Australian little girl should speak like an Australian. I was very angry at such nonsense. The other children speak nicely. Sarah seems to have made a particular pet of Mildred and calls her Mildy.’ There are other hints that in spite of her pleasure at being back with her family she was depressed by her surroundings and suffered from dreadful bouts of nostalgia for Europe. Westhill, compared with the palaces of Rome and even the ordered dignity of Waterpark, must have struck her as a dingy place to call her home, especially after it had been subjected for eighteen months to Cousin Sarah’s genius for creating a drab and impoverished atmosphere. In those days, too, the surroundings of the house were more wild. The oak trees in the long avenue were little more than two rows of twigs, and made no impression on the landscape, and the European trees round the house were the same size. Only the thin drooping leaves of the gum trees, designed by the Almighty more to let the light through than to provide shade, were a scanty protection from the scorching January sun. Also at that time the furniture of the house must have been undistinguished. It had been bought when they moved in, and when they had not much money and were worried with the whole business of the move, complicated by the approaching birth of Mildred. Lady Langton retained any really good furniture and prints which Sir William had owned, and the eighteenth-century portraits and old chests from Waterpark which are here now, were not brought out till about thirty years later. It is even possible that there were not yet any wire blinds on the doors and windows, to keep out the flies, without which life here in the summer would be a nightmare.

  Apparently it was more than Alice could stand, and they had not been there a week before she set about finding another house in Melbourne. Again she took one in East St Kilda, but in Alma Road, further away from the little colony formed by the Bynghams, Lady Langton and the Dells. Neither Austin nor Alice wanted to be too close to Hetty. They could not avoid meeting her occasionally, and so it was not possible to make a complete break. Alice was fond of the little ‘Dell’ boys. They had always been welcome at Westhill, and she could not suddenly deny her affection to children, and as they were Austin’s she had a vague feeling that she was responsible for them. They continued to come and play with their half-brothers in the house in Alma Road. This arrangement illustrates the way in which so many of the family escaped or ignored the influences of the nineteenth century. It would have been quite usual a hundred years earlier, though then everyone would have been aware of the relationship.

  We are now coming into the period of the lives of many people whom I knew well, and so I have more information about it, though I cannot remember exactly who gave it to me. But again, it is largely superficial information, as I only knew them as a child knows an adult. Unless one has access to a find like the diaries, or acquaintance with a reckless old gossip like Arthur, the preceding generation must always appear uniformly respectable. Their idiocies were all committed before one was born, and in the sedateness of middle-age they are not going to give each other away. Who is going to tell a boy that when his father was in his early twenties he got into financial difficulties and gave worthless cheques, or that he only married his mother because her father ‘asked his intentions,’ or even that his uncle was found in bed with a laundress a little older than himself? We have to assume that our parents were always as upright and respectable as when we knew them, and though all the world knows otherwise, no one is going to tell us. And this is quite right, as the sins of the fathers should not be allowed to destroy their authority, or there would be no civilisation left.

  Arthur told me something about Hetty at this time, but not what I would most like to have heard—an account of the first meeting between her and Austin and Alice. It must have been a strain on their savoir faire. Perhaps he was not present, or perhaps the situation was too sensitive, and too full of deep unhappiness for him to be funny about it. He was never ribald about anything which touched Alice immediately, but having once let the cat out of the bag with regard to Austin and Hetty, he could not resist talking about them whenever he had me alone. It had been bottled up in him for so long. He went on about them at the last dinner I had with him in about 1920, before I went to England, and did not come back to Australia for nearly thirty years, until on the death of Dominic I inherited the wreckage of Westhill.

  ‘I felt quite sorry for Hetty at that time,’ said Arthur. ‘It is always uncomfortable when someone who has been outrageously bumptious crumples up. Sometimes one has a devastating retort to make to some pompous ass, but doesn’t make it as one couldn’t bear the indecent spectacle of his collapse—so the brute goes on being pompous. Hetty collapsed. She seemed to have shrunk. Of course with her it could not last for very long, but she was like that for nearly two years. Her clothes looked as if they didn’t fit, and her spirit was so broken that when she and the protoplasm, who it turned out after all really was one, went out in their jinker, she actually let him drive, while in her arms
was that horrible little badge of her shame, your cousin Horace.’

  ‘But he was legitimate,’ I protested.

  ‘You talk like a grocer,’ said Arthur impatiently. ‘If she met Alice and Austin in a friend’s house, she would give them furtive guilty glances, and there were some damned awkward moments when that fool Dell boasted about his splendid sons. Before this Hetty had had a confident, rapacious vitality, which made her clothes unimportant. Now people began to notice how dreadful they really were. What in a way made it worse was that Alice looked better than ever. When she went away she was a very pretty young woman, but when she returned she was beautiful, with the air of someone who knows the world. She had a look in her eye which you don’t see in provincial people. You don’t see it either in the eyes of people who are just worldly. Their eyes are merely shallow and hard. The expression I mean comes from a mixture of knowledge and tolerance, but tolerance with very clear limits, and kindness where it is possible to be kind. You can tell gentle people more by their eyes than anything else. Then Alice’s clothes were always in perfect taste, so that when you saw her beside Hetty in her black alpaca and her cairngorms, or whatever those pebbles are she hangs round her neck, you would not have thought that they could possibly be connected, and if you had been told that Alice’s husband had been unfaithful to her with Hetty, you would have said he was blind and mad. I must say that I was a bit bewildered by Austin’s lack of taste. If one is going to do that sort of thing, it should be all mixed up with secret passages and scented notes, and flunkeys and gold beds. You shouldn’t just sneak into the scullery while the servant’s out, to do a bit of carpentering. Anyhow when they returned Hetty’s game was up. Austin told her Alice knew, and she couldn’t blackmail him any more. He never looked at her again, not in that way, though I believe it half amused him to meet her occasionally, especially in some place like Bishopscourt or at a dinner party at Mrs Hopkins’s, who was president of the committee of the Home for Fallen Girls. Poor old Austin, he had some funny kinks in his nature. As a matter of fact it was damned funny. Hetty all through stuck grimly in the most respectable society, even in this shrunken and collapsed period. It wasn’t only that she had lost Austin, you see, and that Alice knew—that was bad enough—but for the first time in her life she was ashamed of herself, the reason being of course that she had produced Horace. She had exactly the feelings of a great dane that finds a white dachshund in its litter. It was only Horace, nothing else, that made her look so furtive. I was quite sorry for her and saw her fairly often. Alice didn’t mind.’