by Martin Boyd
Uncle George left her in Paris and came on with us. He said that he could not hang about the establishments of couturières, but his real reason was that since the incident in the arena he could hardly bear to be in his wife’s company. He left her a sum of money to buy clothes, and his contempt for her was so great that he allowed her more than he intended, so that there should be no risk of his being drawn into the intimacy of a discussion over the amount. It might be thought that Baba’s position was now impossible, living in close contact with someone of whose dislike she must have been aware, but she was not sensitive, and the standards by which George found her wanting were so far above her perceptions, that she did not know they existed, or thought they existed only for fools.
In London we stayed for a few days in one of those hotels opposite the Oratory, to be near Cousin Emma in Brompton Square, as Baba had asked Laura to sound her about presenting her. Cousin Emma intimated her tariff, which was veiled in the decencies of barter, and any actual cash payment was put against the expense of a new court dress, though she would wear an old one. Laura was the natural person to present Baba, but Cousin Emma’s husband had been knighted and Baba thought it would sound better to be presented by a ‘lady,’ especially one with her own surname, though she did suggest that Laura might ask Lady Dilton. Laura thought we were receiving sufficient benefits from that quarter and refused. She also thought it rather a waste of effort, as none of them would be remaining in London, or staying at embassies abroad where it might be of some use.
Uncle Bertie was deeply shocked at the idea of forking out for Cousin Emma’s expenses, so Helena was presented by the High Commissioner’s wife, in those days not a very distinguished sponsor. Aunt Maysie refused to be presented at all, and said: ‘I’d look a silly old hen with feathers in my hair.’ This annoyed Baba as Aunt Maysie was much more dignified in appearance than herself, who was inclined to be squat and square, and she could not endure the Langtons’ habit of speaking with levity of ‘important’ social occasions. She frequently spoke of parties as ‘important,’ though it was hard to understand why it should be important that a number of people whose sole distinction was the ability to pay for expensive food, and who had no political influence, nor outstanding qualities of intellect or taste, nor even that simple goodness of heart which she so much despised but which alone could win her an eternal tiara when she had to relinquish the slight crescent of diamonds which she had cajoled out of Uncle George, should meet together to become slightly tipsy. I do not mean that there are no parties in Melbourne where people of the greatest charm and culture gather together, and even become slightly tipsy, but Baba did not attend these, or, if she did, did not think them ‘important’ as so few of the guests paid supertax.
When we returned to Waterpark the schools’ vacations had begun, and Dominic and Brian came down with us. Brian had entered on the wholesome process of separating himself from the family. Dominic and I never quite cut the umbilical cord, so that whatever afflicted or infected our relatives, passed into our veins. Brian felt that we were all living on our diminishing fat, spiritual as well as financial, and he wanted to exist in his own right, and even by his own efforts, an extraordinary wish for someone with Byngham blood. But then he felt in himself the ability to do so. Dominic, as well as his grandfather Austin was like the saintly youth Alyosha, who never noticed at whose expense he was living, and I had none of Brian’s confidence in my capacity to earn.
‘Why doesn’t Dad stand for Parliament?’ Brian grumbled to me. ‘He doesn’t make any use of his opportunities.’
Yet Brian, so much more admirable, so satisfactory to right thinking people, would have done far more harm to the human race than Dominic or myself, as he did not want Steven to enter Parliament for the benefits he might do to others, but to himself. He entirely repudiated my form of snobbery and folie de grandeur, partly perhaps because it had no basis in reality, but he wanted to be important in the world. Yet surely it is comparatively harmless to admire dukes, and to talk as if all one’s women friends had counties or race-meetings for surnames. Brian had the current superstition that whoever does regular work and is paid for it, even if it is ultimately mischievous, is more worthy of respect than he who does good without payment.
Because of all this, though I liked Brian far better and was happier in his company, my mind dwelt more on Dominic because we both held the same instinctive beliefs.
George also came down to Waterpark with us. The last time he was there was when he was engaged to Dolly Potts and when the family set out on their curious aimless trek across Europe in the year before I was born. His memories must have made his present situation bitter, especially when Baba arrived with the Craigs a week later. As the house was crowded they had to share a room, which is embarrassing even to think about.
Having seen Dominic and Helena on the roof of the cloisters at Arles, I wondered what he would do about Sylvia on his return home. We had come down by the morning train and arrived at Waterpark just before luncheon. Immediately afterwards he went over to Dilton.
I do not know what his feelings were. The following is only a suggestion. It is possible that with all his romanticisms he had a conflicting strain of enlightened self-interest, the most ignominious of the virtues. He was more a Byngham than a Langton, though more Teba than either, and as we have seen, the Bynghams, chivalrous and generous as they were, had in their time married a fair proportion of rich girls. To give up Sylvia would put him back rather near the schoolroom again. His unfocused pride had at last a direction. He was going to be a married man with an establishment of his own, with what seemed to him a large income as he had not yet begun to spend it, and a very pretty wife who would be an ‘Honourable Mrs.’ It was a big step up from being the insulted and injured, the wastrel son for whom it was impossible to find a niche. He had noticed the difference in Uncle Bertie’s attitude towards him, which had almost a naive deference, and Aunt Baba, although she might try to murder him, was no longer rude.
He may have offered to Helena, when they sat, love among the ruins, on the broken ramparts of Les Baux, whilst all about them beneath the high enamelled sky, the Provençal countryside was bursting into almond blossom and rosemary, to give up Sylvia, and she refused to allow him. She may have refused because she was naturally very straight, and also because she loved him too much to deprive him of a brilliant marriage. I believe that this is what happened, and that when Dominic came back to Waterpark he determined to make the best of what was not such a very bad job, and hurried over to Dilton. This may sound rather out of character, but we cannot live all the time at a high level of sentiment, and as we grow older we find streaks developing in ourselves, good or bad, which our governesses would have said were ‘not like us.’
However, it was obvious that his other feelings remained, and through the early part of the summer they increased in strength. He saw Helena in London and she came down on two or three more visits to Waterpark. His courage was of the active, not the passive kind, and he could not endure inner tensions, of which he had been given enough at birth. He was evidently distracted while the Craigs remained in England, which made life uneasy for all of us. Colonel Rodgers alone reaped any benefit from the situation, as Dominic, to release his feelings would go over to the Dower House and spend the afternoon letting off guns, or slashing with sabres at the stuffed-up colonel, who looked something like a Michelin Tyre advertisement, but whose heart was as tender and blossoming as a schoolgirl’s at this St Martin’s summer of happiness.
It is hard to imagine how Sylvia felt during these few months. I did not often go to Dilton as I was intimidated by the possibilities, and I thought that by now the Diltons could not be very well pleased with the engagement. The marriage had been arranged to take place in the early autumn, so if it were to be broken off it would be better soon. Sylvia was still very much in love with Dominic. She was the most strong-willed of all the Tunstalls, and while she s
till wanted him the engagement would last.
Baba had gone back to London for her gaities, but she often came down for a few days, which did not improve the atmosphere. She talked with a great deal of self-importance about her clothes, her functions and her presentation, and she was very annoyed that George would not take part in them. She wanted him to be presented at a levée at St. James’s Palace, but he said he was not going to pay £40 for a court suit that he could not even wear at the Oddfellows’ Dance at Dandenong when he returned home.
One day he drove her into Frome to catch the train back to London, and he asked me to go with him, clearly to stop a too intimate row on the way to the station. When we were driving back to Waterpark, he suddenly said:
‘How’d you like to come to Ireland with me?’
‘I’d jolly well love it,’ I said.
‘Good. We’ll go and see the Bynghams.’
‘But what about my beastly education?’ I asked.
‘It seems to be pretty erratic,’ said George, which was true.
Mr Woodhall was ill, and had to give up teaching me for a time. There was a moderate amount of human concern for his health, but rather anxiety, though this was mixed with slightly shocking levity, as to whether he could last the necessary years until I could be ordained priest and take the living. If I came back from a walk to the village, everyone would say: ‘How are your chances of the Vicarage going?’
Steven said I could not waste any more time and they would have to find a tutor for me. I was by then too old to begin at any school. When I said that Uncle George had invited me to Ireland, he said crossly: ‘It’s impossible. Everything seems to be going to blazes. I’m not going to have you frittering away your life. You’ll have to earn your living you know.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I replied.
In spite of this, it was decided that if I agreed to work in what were usually my holidays, when they thought it might be cheaper and easier to find an undergraduate to teach me during the Long Vacation, I might go with Uncle George.
George’s motive in taking me, though it may have had an element of kindness, was not very admirable. He pretended that he wanted to revisit the places he had known when he was quartered in Ireland with the militia. He had once met Terence Byngham, the present owner of Kilawly, the place after which our grandparents’ house in St Kilda was named, who, discovering the slight connection between them, asked him to stay if ever he should be in Ireland. To take me, whose mother was a Byngham, gave him a better excuse for using this invitation than if he had gone alone. It also gave an air of innocency to the excursion, the real object of which was, as we shall see, if understandable, not very innocent.
We first went to the dreary site of his camp, where we were both extremely bored. We then went across country to County Sligo. George had written to Cousin Terence who had invited us both to stay. The morning after our arrival he said to me:
‘D’you like being here?’
‘It’s marvellous,’ I replied, believing it was so, having only spent a very riotous evening playing games with my young third cousins whom I had never seen before.
‘Would you like to stay on for a few days while I go to see some old friends in Mayo? It wouldn’t be very interesting for you there, as there are no young people in the house. Mr Byngham has asked you to stay.’ He was red and confused as he made this suggestion and I thought that it was because he felt guilty at abandoning me.
I said that it would be very agreeable to me, and Uncle George left in the middle of the morning.
I think that the next few days were very unhappy for some of my relatives, both for Dominic at Waterpark, and for Uncle George in County Mayo. The Craigs left for Australia at that time as Uncle Bertie had to return to look after his business affairs, but I expect the two most wretched were the two with whom I had least sympathy, Sylvia and Baba. The sorrow of losing what we love is nothing to the torment of having it present but denied us. Baba’s sense of frustration and deprivation at George’s departure on a holiday without her, and his refusal to share her interests may have little to do with love, but if it was only humiliation it was painful enough.
I was unaware of what was happening, and did not even think of it, as the young Bynghams occupied my full attention. As I have said before I regard this family as a species rather than individuals, and as I have not drawn any particular Byngham I should remind the reader from time to time of the type. And while all these waves of feeling and clouded anxieties were continuing beyond the range of my perception, I have the opportunity to do so, in the same way that, while the priest at the altar continues with the Liturgy, the choir sings a motet of Palestrina or Anerio, until the climax of the service suddenly breaks on us with the splendid and dramatic chant: ‘. . . Throughout all ages, world without end.’ This is not an irreverent analogy, as there is a sense in which the whole of life as it is lived out in its passion, is the substance of the Liturgy. This may be truer of the life of Dominic than of most of us.
It was filtered through the Byngham veins that his Teba blood came to him. Their name sounds English, but they were of Scottish origin, having migrated north in the reign of King Stephen, or thereabouts. Here, with that aplomb which was their most evident characteristic, they seized monarchs, married their daughters, conducted raids, were executed and generally upset the kingdom, though always behaving with the greatest courtesy and generosity. In this way their name became a legend of chivalry. They were generally penniless and frequently fled to England, where they died in poverty, or to France to receive ‘a baron’s pay of four shillings a day.’ In the seventeenth century a cadet branch settled in Ireland, where they retained most of their characteristics except that of intruding violently into high politics. Their estate was small, but their lively and confident manner enabled them to marry into the great landowning families of the west of Ireland. Wherever they went they kept their ‘life-style.’ An American book called The Bynghams of Blue River opens with a description of a rambling country house, with all the round rosy-faced Byngham sons sitting on a paddock fence, appraising the form of young racehorses. It was an exact picture of my Byngham uncles at Kilawly near Melbourne. It was also an exact picture of my Byngham cousins at Kilawly, County Sligo. They survived almost miraculously. All these boys were going to Eton, paid for by an aunt who had married a rich Belfast linen-manufacturer. We were waited on by two men, but I had seen the butler earlier in the day bedding out petunias, and the footman in white cotton gloves was, I was sure, the youth who in the morning had bicycled up the drive in a postman’s cap.
My cousins were all pure Byngham in type, ruddy and cheerful as the baron who had tucked King James III under his arm and galloped off to Edinburgh. Their faces were not darkened by Teba blood nor their noses pointed with Langton wit. They were all destined for good regiments, but what would happen to their broods of ruddy sons, whom they were certain to beget? Would more aunts turn up in the thicket to educate them, at least to enable them to go into a line regiment? Here they would be half-respected and half-despised for their candour and simplicity, and they would soon retire to ride buck-jumpers in Canada, unable to accommodate themselves to the society of soldiers who had become too professional, or to the vile methods of modern war.
They would not know why they disliked their surroundings, as their lives having conformed for so many centuries to a definite pattern were more instinctive than directed by the mind. Perhaps we may soon find a young Byngham selling newspapers at the entrance to the Green Park Tube, who, when we ask for a copy of Punch which we occasionally buy in pious memory of our grandparents, apologises with the greatest concern for our disappointment, and in an accent which was noble before the foundation of Oxford, though he addresses us as ‘Governor,’ explains regretfully that he only sells the Evening News. We wonder how a youth with those level-lidded eyes and that manner can earn his living in such a way, not realizi
ng that it is they which make all others impossible to him, and with this young Byngham we exchange a certain recognition, like two exiled gods, Zeus and Hermes, each seeing in the other’s eyes a reflection of Olympus, though he may also sell us a tip for the Cesarewitch.
Even so, the snob who takes his vice seriously would be more gratified to associate with the newsboy at the Green Park Tube, than with any ‘leader of society,’ just as a collector will value more a stained and mildewed Memlinc found in the cellar, than a two-acre canvas by a Victorian Royal Academician. That is really what I am seeking for throughout this book, the Memlinc in the cellar, the beautiful portrait of the human face, lost in the dissolution of our family and our religion.
I am doubtless romanticizing the Bynghams, but there is an element of truth in what I write, which is all I ever claim. Also everyone romanticizes what interests him. I have seen a scientific don, several stages further removed from human semblance than Colonel Rodgers, incandescent with emotion as he foresaw the time when man could receive all necessary nourishment from one pill a day.
However, my Sligo cousins were still far from the Green Park Tube. For breakfast they ate enormous quantities of eggs, fish and devilled chickens’ legs. It did not seem that much of it would go to nourish their brains, though it might strengthen their hearts. They were most friendly to me, and as I felt none of that slight reserve, that withheld judgment which I had noticed in English boys, I expanded joyfully in their company, at least until we went out to the stable yard. Seeing that I came from Australia, as a compliment they put me on the most spirited horse they possessed, which was called Harlequin. We went off to spend the morning galloping about the fields and bogs. When we turned for home I could not control my mount, but tore like the wind, soared over a five-barred gate, and re-entered the yard clinging round the horse’s neck. The young centaurs roared with Homeric laughter. At luncheon, for which surprisingly they had detached their human torsos from their animal legs, they called me ‘The wild man from Borneo,’ and in the afternoon we went out to repeat the performance. Every night I prayed for the return of Uncle George.
