‘If they get in,’ I interrupted.
‘They’ll get in all right,’ said Gabriel confidently. ‘And I’m telling you where they’ll make their mistake. They’ll start pushing people round. All with the best intentions. The ones who aren’t really dyed-in-the-wool Tories are cranks. And God save us from cranks! It’s really remarkable the amount of suffering a really high-minded idealistic crank can inflict on a decent law-abiding country.’
I argued, ‘It still boils down to the fact that you think you know what is best for the country?’
‘Not at all. I know what’s best for John Gabriel. The country’s safe from my experiments because I shall be occupied thinking about myself and how to dig myself in comfortably. I don’t care in the least about being Prime Minister.’
‘You surprise me!’
‘Now don’t make any mistake, Norreys, I probably could become Prime Minister if I wanted to. It’s amazing what you can do, if you just study what people want to hear said and then say it to them! But to be Prime Minister means a lot of worry and hard work. I mean to make a name for myself, that’s all –’
‘And where’s the money coming from? Six hundred a year doesn’t go far.’
‘They’ll have to put it up if Labour gets in. Probably make it a clear thousand. But don’t make any mistake, there are plenty of ways of making money in a political career – some on the side, some straightforward. And there’s marriage –’
‘You’ve planned your marriage, too? A title?’
For some reason he flushed.
‘No,’ he spoke with vehemence. ‘I’m not marrying out of my class. Oh yes, I know what my class is. I’m not a gentleman.’
‘Does that word mean anything nowadays?’ I asked sceptically.
‘The word doesn’t. But the thing the word means is still there.’
He stared in front of him. When he spoke his voice was reflective and far away.
‘I remember going round to a big house with my father. He was doing a job on the kitchen boiler. I stayed around outside the house. A kid came and spoke to me. Nice kid, a year or two older than I was. She took me along with her into the garden – rather a super garden – fountains, you know, and terraces, and big cedar trees and green grass like velvet. Her brother was there, too. He was younger. We played games. Hide and Seek – I Spy – it was fine – we got on together like a house on fire. And then a nannie came out of the house all starched and got up in uniform. Pam, that was the kid’s name, went dancing up to her and said I must come to tea in the nursery, she wanted me to come to tea.
‘I can see that stuck-up nurse’s face now – the primness of it, I can hear the mincing voice!
‘“You can’t do that, dear. He’s just a common little boy.”’
Gabriel stopped. I was shocked – shocked at what cruelty, unconscious unthinking cruelty, can do. He’d been hearing that voice, seeing that face, ever since … He’d been hurt, hurt to the core.
‘But look here,’ I said, ‘it wasn’t the children’s mother. It was – well – a very second-class thing to say – apart from the cruelty –’
He turned a white sombre face on me.
‘You don’t get the point, Norreys. I agree a gentle woman wouldn’t have said a thing like that – she’d have been more considerate – but the fact remains that it was true. I was a common little boy. I’m still a common little boy. I’ll die a common little boy.’
‘Don’t be absurd! What do these things matter?’
‘They don’t matter. They’ve left off mattering. In actual fact, it’s an advantage not to be a gentleman nowadays. People sneer at those rather pathetic straight-backed old ladies and gentlemen who are well connected and haven’t enough to live on. All we’re snobbish about nowadays is education. Education’s our fetish. But the trouble is, Norreys, that I didn’t want to be a common little boy. I went home and said to my father, “Dad, when I grow up I want to be a lord. I want to be Lord John Gabriel.” “And that’s what you’ll never be,” he said. “You’ve got to be born that kind of a lord. They can make you a peer if you get rich enough but it’s not the same thing.” And it isn’t the same thing. There’s something – something I can never have – oh, I don’t mean the title. I mean being born sure of yourself – knowing what you’re going to do or say – being rude only when you mean to be rude – and not being rude just because you feel hot and uncomfortable and want to show you’re as good as anyone else. Not having to go about hot under the collar and wondering all the time what people are thinking of you, but just concerned with what you think of them. Knowing that if you’re queer or shabby or eccentric it doesn’t matter a damn because you are what you are …’
‘Because, in fact, you’re Lady St Loo?’ I suggested.
‘Blast and damn the old bitch!’ said John Gabriel.
I looked at him with considerable interest.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘you’re really very interesting.’
‘It isn’t real to you, is it? You don’t know what I mean. You think you do – but you don’t really get near it.’
‘I knew,’ I said slowly, ‘that there had been something … that you’d had, once, some shock … You were wounded as a child, hurt. In a sense you’ve never got over it –’
‘Cut out the psychology,’ said Gabriel curtly. ‘But you see, don’t you, why, when I get with a nice girl like Milly Burt, I’m happy. And that’s the kind of girl I’m going to marry. She’ll have to have money, of course – but money or no money she’ll be of my own class. You can imagine, can’t you, the hell it would be if I married some stuck-up girl with a face like a horse and spent my life trying to live up to her?’
He paused and said abruptly:
‘You were in Italy. Did you ever get to Pisa?’
‘I have been in Pisa – some years ago.’
‘I think it’s Pisa I mean … There’s a thing there painted on the wall – heaven and hell and purgatory and all the rest of it. Hell’s rather jolly, little devils pushing you down with pitchforks. Heaven’s up above – a row of the blessed sitting under trees with a smug expression on their faces. My god, those women! They don’t know about hell, they don’t know about the damned – they don’t know anything! They just sit there, smiling smugly –’ His passion rose – ‘Smug, smug, self-satisfied – God, I’d like to tear them down from their trees and their state of beatitude and pitch them down into the flames! Hold them there writhing; make them feel, make them suffer! What right have they not to know what suffering is? There they sit, smiling, and nothing can ever touch them … Their heads among the stars … Yes, that’s it, among the stars …’
He got up, his voice fell, his eyes looked past me, vague, searching eyes …
‘Among the stars,’ he repeated.
Then he laughed.
‘Sorry to have inflicted all this on you. But after all, why not? The Harrow Road may have made a pretty fair wreck of you, but you’re still good for something – you can listen to me when I feel like talking … You’ll find, I expect, that people will talk to you a good deal.’
‘I do find that.’
‘Do you know why? It isn’t because you’re such a wonderfully sympathetic listener or anything like that. It’s because you’re no good for anything else.’
He stood, his head a little on one side, his eyes, angry eyes still, watching me. He wanted his words to hurt me, I think. But they did not hurt me. I experienced instead considerable relief in hearing put into spoken words the things that I had been thinking inside my head …
‘Why the hell you don’t get out of it all I can’t think,’ he said, ‘or haven’t you got the means?’
‘I’ve got the means all right,’ I said, and my hand closed round my bottle of tablets.
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You’ve got more guts than I thought …’
Chapter Eleven
Mrs Carslake spent some time talking to me next morning. I did not like Mrs Carslake. She was a thin dark woman wi
th an acid tongue. I don’t think that all the time I was at Polnorth House I ever heard her say a nice thing about anyone. Sometimes, for sheer amusement, I used to mention name after name and wait for the first sweetness of her comments to go sour.
She was talking now of Milly Burt.
‘She’s a nice little thing,’ she said. ‘And so anxious to help. She’s rather stupid, of course, and not very well educated politically. Women of that class are very apathetic politically.’
It was my own impression that Milly Burt’s class was also Mrs Carslake’s class. To annoy her, I said:
‘Just like Teresa, in fact.’
Mrs Carslake looked shocked.
‘Oh, but Mrs Norreys is very clever –’ then came the usual touch of venom – ‘far too clever for me sometimes. I get the impression often that she quite despises us all. Intellectual women are often very wrapped up in themselves, don’t you think so? Of course, I wouldn’t exactly call Mrs Norreys selfish –’
Then she reverted to Milly Burt.
‘It’s a good thing for Mrs Burt to have something to do,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid, you know, she has a very unhappy home life.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it.’
‘That man Burt is going right down the hill. He comes reeling out of the King’s Arms at closing time. Really, I wonder they serve him. And I believe he’s quite violent sometimes – or so the neighbours say. She’s frightened to death of him, you know.’
Her nose quivered at the tip – it was, I decided, a quiver indicating pleasurable sensations.
‘Why doesn’t she leave him?’ I asked.
Mrs Carslake looked shocked.
‘Oh really, Captain Norreys, she couldn’t do a thing like that! Where could she go? She’s no relations. I’ve sometimes thought that if a sympathetic young man came along – I don’t feel, you know, that she has very strong principles. And she’s quite good-looking in a rather obvious sort of way.’
‘You don’t like her very much, do you?’ I said.
‘Oh yes – I do – but of course I hardly know her. A vet – well, I mean it isn’t like a doctor.’
Having made this social distinction quite clear, Mrs Carslake asked solicitously if there wasn’t anything she could do for me.
‘It’s very kind of you. I don’t think there’s anything.’
I was looking out of the window. She followed my eyes and saw what I was looking at.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s Isabella Charteris.’
Together we watched Isabella coming nearer, passing through the field gate, coming up the steps to the terrace.
‘She’s quite a handsome girl,’ said Mrs Carslake. ‘Very quiet, though. I often think these quiet girls are inclined to be sly.’
The word sly made me feel indignant. I couldn’t say anything because Mrs Carslake had made her statement an exit line.
Sly – it was a horrible word! Especially as applied to Isabella. The quality most in evidence in Isabella was honesty – a fearless and almost painstaking honesty.
At least – I remembered suddenly the way she had let her scarf fall over those wretched tablets. The ease with which she had pretended to be in the middle of a conversation. And all without excitement or fuss – simply, naturally – as though she had been doing that sort of thing all her life.
Was that, perhaps, what Mrs Carslake had meant by the word ‘sly’?
I thought to myself that I would ask Teresa what she thought about it. Teresa was not given to volunteering opinions, but if you asked for them you could have them.
When Isabella arrived I saw that she was excited. I don’t know that it would have been apparent to anybody else, but I spotted it at once. Up to a point, I was beginning to know Isabella fairly well.
She began abruptly without wasting time in greetings.
‘Rupert is coming – really coming,’ she said. ‘He may arrive any day now. He’s flying home, of course.’
She sat down and smiled. Her long narrow hands were folded in her lap. Behind her head the yew tree outside made a pattern against the sky. She sat there looking beatific. Her attitude, the picture she made, reminded me of something. Something that I had seen or heard just lately …
‘Does his coming mean a lot to you?’ I asked.
‘Yes, it does. Oh yes.’ She added, ‘You see, I have been waiting a long time.’
Was there possibly a touch of Mariana in the moated grange about Isabella? Did she belong, just a little, to the Tennyson period?
‘Waiting for Rupert?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you – so fond of him?’
‘I think I am fonder of Rupert than anyone in the world.’ Then she added, managing somehow to give a different intonation to the repetition of the same words, ‘I – think I am.’
‘Aren’t you sure?’
She looked at me with a sudden grave distress.
‘Can one ever be sure of anything?’
It was not a statement of her feelings. It was definitely a question.
She asked me because she thought I might know the answer she did not know. She could not guess how that particular question hurt me.
‘No,’ I said, and my voice was harsh in my own ears. ‘One can never be sure.’
She accepted the answer, looking down at the quietness of her folded hands.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘I see.’
‘How long is it since you have seen him?’
‘Eight years.’
‘You are a romantic creature, Isabella,’ I said.
She looked at me questioningly.
‘Because I believe that Rupert will come home and that we shall be married? But it isn’t really romantic. It’s more that it’s a pattern –’ Her long still hands quivered into life, tracing something on the surface of her frock. ‘My pattern and his pattern. They will come together and join. I don’t think I could ever leave St Loo. I was born here and I’ve always lived here. I want to go on living here. I expect I shall – die here.’
She shivered a little as she said the last words, and at the same time a cloud came over the sun.
I wondered again in my own mind at her queer horror of death.
‘I don’t think you’ll die for a long time, Isabella,’ I said consolingly. ‘You’re very strong and healthy.’
She assented eagerly.
‘Yes, I’m very strong. I’m never ill. I think I might live to be ninety, don’t you? Or even a hundred. After all, people do.’
I tried to picture to myself an Isabella of ninety. I just couldn’t see it. And yet I could easily imagine Lady St Loo living to be a hundred. But then Lady St Loo had a vigorous and forceful personality, she impinged on life, she was conscious of herself as a director and creator of events. She battled for life – Isabella accepted it.
Gabriel opened the door and came in, saying:
‘Look here, Norreys –’ and then stopped when he saw Isabella.
He said, ‘Oh – good morning, Miss Charteris.’
His manner was slightly awkward and self-conscious. Was it, I wondered amusedly, the shadow of Lady St Loo?
‘We are discussing life and death,’ I said cheerfully.
‘I’ve just been prophesying that Miss Charteris will live to be ninety.’
‘I shouldn’t think she’d want to,’ said Gabriel. ‘Who would?’
‘I would,’ said Isabella.
‘Why?’
She said, ‘I don’t want to die.’
‘Oh,’ said Gabriel cheerfully, ‘nobody wants to die. At least they don’t mind death, but they’re afraid of dying. A painful messy business.’
‘It’s death that I mind,’ said Isabella. ‘Not pain. I can stand a lot of pain.’
‘That’s what you think,’ said Gabriel.
Something in his amused scornful tone angered Isabella. She flushed.
‘I can stand pain.’
They looked at each other. His glance was still scornful, hers was challenging.
> And then Gabriel did something that I could hardly credit.
I had laid my cigarette down. With a quick gesture he leaned across me, picked it up and brought its glowing tip close to Isabella’s arm.
She did not flinch or move her arm away.
I think I cried out in protest, but neither of them paid any attention to me. He pressed the glowing end down on to the skin.
The whole ignominy and bitterness of the cripple was mine at that moment. To be helpless, bound, unable to act. I could do nothing. Revolted by Gabriel’s savagery, I could do nothing to prevent it.
I saw Isabella’s face slowly whiten with pain. Her lips closed tight. She did not move. Her eyes looked steadily into Gabriel’s.
‘Are you mad, Gabriel?’ I cried. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
He paid absolutely no attention to me. I might not have been in the room.
Suddenly, with a quick movement, he tossed the cigarette into the fireplace.
‘I apologize,’ he said to Isabella. ‘You can take it all right.’
And thereupon, without a further word, he went out of the room.
I was almost inarticulate, trying to get words out.
‘The brute – the savage – what the hell did he think he was doing? He ought to be shot …’
Isabella, her eyes on the door, was slowly winding a handkerchief round her burnt arm. She was doing it, if I can use the term, almost absentmindedly. As though her thoughts were elsewhere.
Then, from a long way away, as it were, she looked at me.
She seemed a little surprised.
‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.
The Rose and the Yew Tree Page 9
