The story ends here, where I am beginning it. It ends with John Gabriel. But it also begins here.
Chapter One
Where to begin? At St Loo? At the meeting in the Memorial Hall when the prospective Conservative candidate, Major John Gabriel, VC, was introduced by an old (a very old) general, and stood there and made his speech, disappointing us all a little by his flat, common voice and his ugly face, so that we had to fortify ourselves by the recollection of his gallantry and by reminding ourselves that it was necessary to get into touch with the People – the privileged classes were now so pitifully small!
Or shall I begin at Polnorth House, in the long low room that faced the sea, with the terrace outside where my invalid couch could be drawn out on fine days and I could look out to the Atlantic with its thundering breakers, and the dark grey rocky point which broke the line of the horizon and on which rose the battlements and the turrets of St Loo Castle – looking, as I always felt, like a water colour sketch done by a romantic young lady in the year 1860 or thereabouts.
For St Loo Castle has that bogus, that phony air of theatricality, of spurious romance which can only be given by something that is in fact genuine. It was built, you see, when human nature was unselfconscious enough to enjoy romanticism without feeling ashamed of it. It suggests sieges, and dragons, and captive princesses and knights in armour, and all the pageantry of a rather bad historical film. And, of course, when you come to think of it, a bad film is exactly what history really is.
When you looked at St Loo Castle, you expected something like Lady St Loo, and Lady Tressilian, and Mrs Bigham Charteris, and Isabella. The shock was that you got them!
Shall I begin there, with the visit paid by those three old ladies with their erect bearing, their dowdy clothing, their diamonds in old-fashioned settings? With my saying to Teresa in a fascinated voice, ‘But they can’t – they simply can’t – be real?’
Or shall I start a little earlier; at the moment, for instance, when I got into the car and started for Northolt Aerodrome to meet Jennifer …?
But behind that again is my life – which had started thirty-eight years before and which came to an end that day …
This is not my story. I have said that before. But it began as my story. It began with me, Hugh Norreys. Looking back over my life, I see that it has been a life much like any other man’s life. Neither more interesting, nor less so. It has had the inevitable disillusionments and disappointments, the secret childish agonies; it has had also the excitements, the harmonies, the intense satisfactions arising from oddly inadequate causes. I can choose from which angle I will view my life – from the angle of frustration, or as a triumphant chronicle. Both are true. It is, in the end, always a question of selection. There is Hugh Norreys as he sees himself, and Hugh Norreys as he appears to others. There must actually be, too, Hugh Norreys as he appears to God. There must be the essential Hugh. But his story is the story that only the recording angel can write. It comes back to this: How much do I know, now, of the young man who got into the train at Penzance in the early days of 1945 on his way to London? Life had, I should have said if asked, on the whole treated me well. I liked my peacetime job of schoolmastering. I had enjoyed my war experiences – I had my job waiting to return to – and the prospect of a partnership and a headmastership in the future. I had had love affairs that hurt me, and I had had love affairs that had satisfied me, but none that went deep. I had family ties that were adequate, but not too close. I was thirty-seven and on that particular day I was conscious of something of which I had been half-conscious for some time. I was waiting for something … for an experience, for a supreme event …
Everything up to then in my life, I suddenly felt, had been superficial – I was waiting now for something real. Probably everyone experiences such a feeling once at least in their lives. Sometimes it comes early, sometimes late. It is a moment that corresponds to the moment in a cricket match when you go in to bat …
I got on the train at Penzance and I took a ticket for third lunch (because I had just finished a rather large breakfast) and when the attendant came along the train shouting out nasally, ‘Third lunch, please, tickets ooonlee …’ I got up and went along to the dining car and the attendant took my ticket and gestured me into a single seat, back to the engine, opposite the place where Jennifer was sitting.
That, you see, is how things happen. You cannot take thought for them, you cannot plan. I sat down opposite Jennifer – and Jennifer was crying.
I didn’t see it at first. She was struggling hard for control. There was no sound, no outward indication. We did not look at each other, we behaved with due regard to the conventions governing the meeting of strangers on a restaurant car. I advanced the menu towards her – a polite but meaningless action since it only bore the legend: Soup, Fish or Meat, Sweet or Cheese. 4/6.
She accepted my gesture with the answering gesture, a polite ritualistic smile and an inclination of the head. The attendant asked us what we would have to drink. We both had light ale.
Then there was a pause. I looked at the magazine I had brought in with me. The attendant dashed along the car with plates of soup and set them in front of us. Still the little gentleman, I advanced the salt and pepper an inch in Jennifer’s direction. Up to now I had not looked at her – not really looked, that is to say – though, of course, I knew certain basic facts. That she was young, but not very young, a few years younger than myself, that she was of medium height and dark, that she was of my own social standing and that while attractive enough to be pleasant, she was not so overwhelmingly attractive as to be in any sense disturbing.
Presently I intended to look rather more closely, and if it seemed indicated I should probably advance a few tentative remarks. It would depend.
But the thing that suddenly upset all my calculations was the fact that my eyes, straying over the soup plate opposite me, noticed that something unexpected was splashing into the soup. Without noise, or sound, or any indication of distress, tears were forcing themselves from her eyes and dropping into the soup.
I was startled. I cast swift surreptitious glances at her. The tears soon stopped, she succeeded in forcing them back, she drank her soup. I said, quite unpardonably, but irresistibly:
‘You’re dreadfully unhappy, aren’t you?’
And she replied fiercely, ‘I’m a perfect fool!’
Neither of us spoke. The waiter took the soup plates away. He laid minute portions of meat pie in front of us and helped us from a monstrous dish of cabbage. To this he added two roast potatoes with the air of one doing us a special favour.
I looked out of the window and made a remark about the scenery. I proceeded to a few remarks about Cornwall. I said I didn’t know it well. Did she? She said, Yes, she did, she lived there. We compared Cornwall with Devonshire, and with Wales, and with the east coast. None of our conversation meant anything. It served the purpose of glossing over the fact that she had been guilty of shedding tears in a public place and that I had been guilty of noticing the fact.
It was not until we had coffee in front of us and I had offered her a cigarette and she had accepted it, that we got back to where we had started.
I said I was sorry I had been so stupid, but that I couldn’t help it. She said I must have thought her a perfect idiot.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought that you’d come to the end of your tether. That was it, wasn’t it?’
She said, Yes, that was it.
‘It’s humiliating,’ she said fiercely, ‘to get to such a pitch of self-pity that you don’t care what you do or who sees you!’
‘But you did care. You were struggling hard.’
‘I didn’t actually howl,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you mean.’
I asked her how bad it was.
She said it was pretty bad. She had got to the end of everything, and she didn’t know what to do.
I think I had already sensed that. There was an air of taut desperation about her. I wasn�
��t going to let her get away from me while she was in that mood. I said, ‘Come on, tell me about it. I’m a stranger – you can say things to a stranger. It won’t matter.’
She said, ‘There’s nothing to tell except that I’ve made the most bloody mess of everything – everything.’
I told her it wasn’t probably as bad as all that. She needed, I could see, reassurance. She needed new life, new courage – she needed lifting up from a pitiful slough of endurance and suffering and setting on her feet again. I had not the slightest doubt that I was the person best qualified to do that … Yes, it happened as soon as that.
She looked at me doubtfully, like an uncertain child. Then she poured it all out.
In the midst of it, of course, the attendant came with the bill. I was glad then that we were having the third lunch. They wouldn’t hustle us out of the dining car. I added ten shillings to my bill, and the attendant bowed discreetly and melted away.
I went on listening to Jennifer.
She’d had a raw deal. She’d stood up to things with an incredible amount of pluck, but there had been too many things, one after the other, and she wasn’t, physically, strong. Things had gone wrong for her all along – as a child, as a girl, in her marriage. Her sweetness, her impulsiveness, had landed her every time in a hole. There had been loopholes for escape and she hadn’t taken them – she’d preferred to try and make the best of a bad job. And when that had failed, and a loophole had presented itself, it had been a bad loophole, and she’d landed herself in a worse mess than ever.
For everything that had happened, she blamed herself. My heart warmed to that lovable trait in her – there was no judgment, no resentment. ‘It must,’ she ended up wistfully every time, ‘have been my fault somehow …’
I wanted to roar out, ‘Of course it wasn’t your fault! Don’t you see that you’re a victim – that you’ll always be a victim so long as you adopt that fatal attitude of being willing to take all the blame for everything?’
She was adorable sitting there, worried and miserable and defeated. I think I knew then, looking at her across the narrow table, what it was I had been waiting for. It was Jennifer … not Jennifer as a possession, but to give Jennifer back her mastery of life, to see Jennifer happy, to see her whole once more.
Yes, I knew then … though it wasn’t until many weeks afterwards that I admitted to myself that I was in love with her.
You see, there was so much more to it than that.
We made no plans for meeting again. I think she believed truly that we would not meet again. I knew otherwise. She had told me her name. She said, very sweetly, when we at last left the dining car, ‘This is goodbye. But please believe I shall never forget you and what you’ve done for me. I was desperate – quite desperate.’
I took her hand and I said goodbye – but I knew it wasn’t goodbye. I was so sure of it that I would have been willing to agree not even to try and find her again. But as it chanced there were friends of hers who were friends of mine. I did not tell her, but to find her again would be easy. What was odd was that we had not happened to meet before this.
I met her again a week later, at Caro Strangeways’s cocktail party. And after that, there was no more doubt about it. We both knew what had happened to us …
We met and parted and met again. We met at parties, in other people’s houses, we met at small quiet restaurants, we took trains into the country and walked together in a world that was all a shining haze of unreal bliss. We went to a concert and heard Elizabeth Schumann sing ‘And in that pathway where our feet shall wander, we’ll meet, forget the earth and lost in dreaming, bid heaven unite a love that earth no more shall sunder …’
And as we went out into the noise and bustle of Wigmore Street I repeated the last words of Strauss’s song ‘– in love and bliss ne’er ending …’ and met her eyes.
She said, ‘Oh no, not for us, Hugh …’
And I said, ‘Yes, for us …’
Because, as I pointed out to her, we had got to go through the rest of our lives together …
She couldn’t, she said, throw everything over like that. Her husband, she knew, wouldn’t consent to let her divorce him.
‘But he’d divorce you?’
‘Yes, I suppose so … Oh Hugh, can’t we go on as we are?’
No, I said, we couldn’t. I’d been waiting, watching her fight her way back to health and sanity. I hadn’t wanted to let her vex herself with decisions until she was once more the happy joyful creature Nature had created her to be. Well, I’d done it. She was strong again – strong mentally and physically. And we’d got to come to a decision.
It wasn’t plain sailing. She had all sorts of queer, quite unpredictable objections. Chiefly, it was because of me and my career that she demurred. It would mean a complete breakup for me. Yes, I said, I knew that. I’d thought it out, and it didn’t matter. I was young – there were other things that I could do besides schoolmastering.
She cried then and said that she’d never forgive herself if, because of her, I were to ruin my life. I told her that nothing could ruin it, unless she herself were to leave me. Without her, I said, life would be finished for me.
We had a lot of ups and downs. She would seem to accept my view, then suddenly, when I was no longer with her, she would retract. She had, you see, no confidence in herself.
Yet, little by little, she came to share my outlook. It was not only passion between us – there was more than that. That harmony of mind and thought – that delight in mind answering mind. The things that she would say – which had just been on my own lips – the sharing of a thousand small minor pleasures.
She admitted at last that I was right, that we belonged together. Her last defences went down.
‘It is true! Oh Hugh, how it can be, I don’t know. How can I really mean to you what you say I do? And yet I don’t really doubt.’
The thing was tested – proved. We made plans, the necessary mundane plans.
It was a cold sunny morning when I woke up and realized that on that day our new life was starting. From now on Jennifer and I would be together. Not until this moment had I allowed myself to believe fully. I had always feared that her strange morbid distrust of her own capabilities would make her draw back.
Even on this, the last morning of the old life, I had to make quite sure. I rang her up.
‘Jennifer …’
‘Hugh …’
Her voice, soft with a tiny tremor in it … It was true. I said:
‘Forgive me, darling. I had to hear your voice. Is it all true?’
‘It’s all true …’
We were to meet at Northolt Aerodrome. I hummed as I dressed, I shaved carefully. In the mirror I saw a face almost unrecognizable with sheer idiotic happiness. This was my day! The day I had waited for for thirty-eight years. I breakfasted, checked over tickets, passport. I went down to the car. Harriman was driving. I told him I would drive – he could sit behind.
I turned out of the Mews into the main road. The car wound in and out of the traffic. I had plenty of time. It was a glorious morning – a lovely morning created specially for Hugh and Jennifer. I could have sung and shouted.
The lorry came at forty miles an hour out of the side road – there was no seeing or avoiding it – no failure in driving – no faulty reaction. The driver of the lorry was drunk, they told me afterwards – how little it matters why a thing happens!
It struck the Buick broadside on, wrecking it – pinning me under the wreckage. Harriman was killed.
Jennifer waited at the aerodrome. The plane left … I did not come …
Chapter Two
There isn’t much point in describing what came next. There wasn’t, to begin with, any continuity. There was confusion, darkness, pain … I wandered endlessly, it seemed to me, in long underground corridors. At intervals I realized dimly that I was in a hospital ward. I was aware of doctors, white-capped nurses, the smell of antiseptics – the flashing of steel instrumen
ts, glittering little glass trolleys being wheeled briskly about …
Realization came to me slowly – there was less confusion, less pain … but no thoughts as yet of people or of places. The animal in pain knows only pain or the surcease of pain, it can concentrate on nothing else. Drugs, mercifully dulling physical suffering, confuse the mind; heightening the impression of chaos.
But lucid intervals began to come – there was the moment when they told me definitely that I had had an accident.
Knowledge came at last – knowledge of my helplessness – of my wrecked broken body … There was no more life for me as a man amongst men.
People came to see me – my brother, awkward, tongue-tied, with no idea of what to say. We had never been very close. I could not speak to him of Jennifer.
But it was of Jennifer I was thinking. As I improved, they brought me my letters. Letters from Jennifer …
Only my immediate family had been admitted to see me. Jennifer had had no claim, no right. She had been technically only a friend.
They won’t let me come, Hugh darling, she wrote. I shall come as soon as they do. All my love. Concentrate on getting better, Jennifer.
And another:
Don’t worry, Hugh. Nothing matters so long as you are not dead. That’s all that matters. We shall be together soon – for always. Yours Jennifer.
I wrote to her, a feeble pencil scrawl, that she mustn’t come. What had I to offer Jennifer now?
It was not until I was out of the hospital and in my brother’s house that I saw Jennifer again. Her letters had all sounded the same note. We loved each other! Even if I never recovered we must be together. She would look after me. There would still be happiness – not the happiness of which we had once dreamed, but still happiness.
And though my first reaction had been to cut the knot ruthlessly, to say to Jennifer, ‘Go away, and never come near me,’ I wavered. Because I believed, as she did, that the tie between us was not of the flesh only. All the delights of mental companionship would still be ours. Certainly it would be best for her to go and forget me – but if she would not go?
The Rose and the Yew Tree Page 2
