Her nice round face was quivering with sentimental pleasure. Both Teresa and I felt touched by her happiness. It showed so clearly the lack of certain things in her own life. In the joy of the moment, she became far less maternal in her attitude to me, which made me enjoy her company a great deal better. For the first time she brought me no booklets and hardly tried at all to be bright and encouraging. It was clear that Rupert and Isabella occupied all her thoughts.
The attitudes of the other two old ladies varied slightly. Mrs Bigham Charteris redoubled her energy and briskness. She took Rupert on immense walks around the estate, introduced him to his tenants and lectured him on roofs and repairs and what had positively got to be done, and what could and indeed must, be left undone.
‘Amos Polflexen always grouses. He had entirely new pointing to the walls two years ago. Something must be done about Ellen Heath’s chimney. She’s been very patient. The Heaths have been tenants of the estate for three hundred years.’
But it was Lady St Loo’s attitude that I found the most interesting. For some time I could not understand it. Then one day I got the clue. It was triumph. A curious sort of triumph – a kind of gloating as over a battle won against an invisible and non-existent antagonist.
‘It will be all right now,’ she said to me.
And then she gave a sigh – a long tired sigh. It was as though she said, ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace …’ She gave me the impression of one who has been afraid – but has not dared to show fear – and who knows the occasion for fear is now over.
Well, I suppose that the odds against young Lord St Loo returning and marrying a cousin he had not seen for eight years were pretty heavy. Far the most likely thing was for Rupert to have married a stranger in the war years. Marriages take place quickly in wartime. Yes, it must have been long odds against Rupert marrying Isabella.
And yet there was a rightness about it – a fitness.
I asked Teresa if she did not agree and she nodded her head thoughtfully.
‘They’re a wonderful pair,’ she said.
‘Made for each other. That’s what old family servants say at weddings, but this time it really is true.’
‘It is true. It’s incredible … Don’t you feel sometimes, Hugh, as though you’ll wake up?’
I considered a moment or two because I knew what she meant.
‘Nothing to do with St Loo Castle is real,’ I said.
I was bound to hear John Gabriel’s opinion. He kept up his habit of frankness with me. As far as I could make out, Gabriel disliked Lord St Loo. That was natural enough, because Rupert St Loo necessarily stole a good deal of Gabriel’s thunder.
The whole of St Loo was thrilled by the arrival of the castle’s rightful owner. The original inhabitants were proud of the antiquity of his title and remembered his father. The new inhabitants were more snobbishly thrilled.
‘Disgusting lot of sheep,’ said Gabriel. ‘It’s amazing to me how, say what they will, the Englishman always loves a title.’
‘Don’t call a Cornishman an Englishman,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you learnt that yet?’
‘It slipped out. But it’s true, isn’t it? Either they come fawning round – or else they go to the other extreme and say what a farce the whole thing is and get violent, and that’s just inverted snobbery.’
‘What about your feelings?’ I said.
Gabriel immediately grinned. He was always appreciative of a point that told against him.
‘I’m an inverted snob all right,’ he said. ‘The thing I’d really like better than anything in the world would be to have been born Rupert St Loo.’
‘You astonish me,’ I said.
‘There are some things you’ve got to be born with – I’d give anything to have his legs,’ said Gabriel thoughtfully.
I remembered what Lady Tressilian had said at Gabriel’s first meeting, and it interested me to see what a perceptive person Gabriel was.
I asked whether Gabriel felt that Rupert St Loo was stealing his thunder.
Gabriel considered the question seriously on its merits without showing any signs of annoyance.
No, he said, he thought it was quite all right because Lord St Loo wasn’t his political opponent. It was all additional propaganda for the Conservative Party.
‘Though I daresay if he did stand – I mean if he could stand (which of course he can’t, being a peer) he’d be quite likely to stand for Labour.’
‘Surely not,’ I objected. ‘Not as a landowner.’
‘He wouldn’t like land nationalization, of course – but things are very twisted round nowadays, Norreys. Farmers and solid working-class men are the staunch Conservatives and young men with intellects and degrees and lots of money are Labour, mainly, I suppose, because they don’t know the first thing about really working with their hands and haven’t an idea what a working man really wants.’
‘And what does the working man want?’ I asked, because I knew Gabriel was always giving one different answers to this question.
‘He wants the country to be prosperous – so that he can be prosperous. He thinks the Conservatives are more likely to make the country prosperous because they know more about money, which, of course, is really very sound. I should say Lord St Loo is really an old-fashioned Liberal – and, of course, nobody’s got any use for a Liberal. No, they haven’t, Norreys, it’s no use your opening your mouth to say what you’re going to say. You wait for the result of the elections. The Liberals will have diminished so much that you’ll have to look for them with a magnifying glass. Nobody ever does like Liberal ideas, really, by which I mean that nobody ever likes the middle course. It’s too damned tame.’
‘And you consider Rupert St Loo is an advocate of the middle way?’
‘Yes. He’s a reasonable man – keeps in with the old and welcomes the new – in fact, neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring. Gingerbread – that’s what he is!’
‘What?’ I demanded.
‘You heard what I said. Gingerbread! Gingerbread castle! Gingerbread owner of castle.’ He snorted. ‘Gingerbread wedding!’
‘And a gingerbread bride?’ I asked.
‘No. She’s all right … she’s just strayed in – like Hansel and Gretel into the gingerbread house. It’s attractive, gingerbread, you can break off a bit of it and eat it. It’s edible all right.’
‘You don’t like Rupert St Loo much, do you?’
‘Why should I? Come to that, he doesn’t like me.’
I considered for a moment or two. No, I did not think Rupert St Loo did like John Gabriel.
‘Still, he’ll have to have me,’ said Gabriel. ‘Here I shall be – Member of Parliament for his part of the world. They’ll have to ask me to dinner from time to time and he’ll sit on platforms with me.’
‘You’re very sure of yourself, Gabriel. You’re not in yet.’
‘I tell you the thing’s a certainty. It’s got to be. I shouldn’t get another chance, you know. I’m by way of being an experiment. If the experiment fails, my name’s mud and I’m done for. I can’t go back to soldiering, either. You see, I’m not an administrative soldier – I’m only useful when there’s a real scrap on. When the Japanese war ends, I’m finished. Othello’s occupation’s gone.’
‘I have never,’ I said, ‘found Othello a credible character.’
‘Why not? Jealousy never is credible.’
‘Well, shall we say – not a sympathetic character. One isn’t sorry for him. One feels he is merely a damned fool.’
‘No,’ said Gabriel reflectively. ‘No – one isn’t sorry for him. Not sorry for him in the way one is sorry for Iago.’
‘Sorry for Iago? Really, Gabriel, you seem to have the oddest sympathies.’
He flashed me a queer look.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
He got up and walked about, moving jerkily. He pushed some of the things on the writing table about unseeingly. I saw with some curiosit
y that he was labouring under some deeply-felt inarticulate emotion.
‘I understand Iago,’ he said. ‘I understand even why the poor devil never says anything in the end except
Demand me nothing, what you know, you know.
From this time forth, I never will speak word.’
He turned on me. ‘Fellows like you, Norreys, fellows who’ve lived on good terms with yourself all your life, who’ve been able to grow up with yourself without flinching (if I can put it like that) well, what the hell can you know about the Iagos – the doomed men, the little mean men? My God, if I ever produced Shakespeare, I’d go to town on Iago – I’d get an actor who was an actor – an actor who could move you to the bowels! Imagine to yourself what it’s like to be born a coward – to lie and cheat and get away with it – to love money so much that you wake up and eat and sleep and kiss your wife with money foremost in your brain. And all the time to know what you are …
‘That’s the hell of life – to have one good fairy at the christening in amongst all the bad ones. And when the rest of the crew have turned you into a dirty skunk, to have Fairy Daydream wave her wand and flute out, “I give him the gift of seeing and knowing …”
‘“We needs must love the highest when we see it.” What damned fool said that? Wordsworth, probably – a man who couldn’t even see a primrose and be satisfied with the lovely thing …
‘I tell you, Norreys, you hate the highest when you see it – hate it because it’s not for you – because you can never be what you’d sell your soul to be. The man who really values courage is often the man who runs away when danger comes. I’ve seen that, more than once. Do you think a man is what he wants to be? A man is what he is born. Do you think the poor devil who worships money wants to worship money? Do you think the man with a sensual imagination wants to have a sensual imagination? Do you think the man who runs away wants to run away?
‘The man you envy (really envy) isn’t the man who’s done better than you. The man you envy is the man who is better than you.
‘If you’re down in the mud, you hate the human being who’s up amongst the stars. You want to pull her down … down … down … to where you’re wallowing in your pigsty … pity Iago, I say. He’d have been all right if he hadn’t met Othello. He’d have got along very well doing the confidence trick. Nowadays he’d have been selling non-existent gold-mining shares to chumps in the Ritz Bar.
‘A plausible fellow, Iago, so honest, always able to take in the simple soldier. Nothing easier than to take in a soldier – the greater the soldier, the more of a fool he is in business matters. It’s always soldiers who buy dud shares, and believe in schemes for getting up Spanish treasure from sunk galleons, and buy chicken farms that are on their last legs. Soldiers are the believing kind. Othello was the kind of mug who would have fallen for any plausible tale put across by an artist – and Iago was an artist. You’ve only got to read between the lines in that play and it’s as clear as day that Iago’s been embezzling the regimental funds. Othello doesn’t believe that – oh no, not honest stupid Iago – it’s just muddleheadedness on the dear old fellow’s part – but he gets in Cassio and puts him in over Iago’s head. Cassio was a countercaster and that’s an accountant or I’ll eat my hat. A good honest fellow, Iago (so Othello thought), but not bright enough for promotion.
‘Remember all that swashbuckling stuff Iago spouts about his prowess in battles? All hooey, Norreys – it never happened. It’s what you can hear any day in a pub from the man who was never near the front line. Falstaff stuff, only this time it’s not comedy but tragedy. Iago, poor devil, wanted to be an Othello. He wanted to be a brave soldier and an upright man, and he couldn’t be, any more than a hunchback can stand upright. He wanted to cut a dash with women, and women hadn’t any use for him. That good-natured trollop of a wife of his despised him as a man. She was only too ready to hop into bed with other men. You bet all the women wanted to go to bed with Othello! I tell you, Norreys, I’ve seen some odd things happen with men who are sexually shamed. It turns them pathological. Shakespeare knew. Iago can’t open his mouth without a stream of black, thwarted, sexual venom pouring out of it. What nobody ever seems to see is, that that man suffered! He could see beauty – he knew what it was – he knew a noble nature. My God, Norreys, material envy, envy of success, of possessions, of riches – is nothing – nothing at all to spiritual envy! That’s vitriol all right – eating in, destroying you. You see the highest, and against your will you love it, and so you hate it, and you don’t rest till you have destroyed it – till you’ve torn it down and stamped it out … Yes, Iago suffered, poor devil …
‘And if you ask me, Shakespeare knew that and was sorry for the poor wretch. In the end, I mean. I daresay he started out dipping his quill pen in the ink, or whatever they used in those days, and setting out to draw a thorough black-hearted villain. But to do it, he had to go all the way with Iago, he had to go along with him and go down into the depths with him, he had to feel what Iago felt. And that’s why when retribution comes, when Iago is for it, Shakespeare saves his pride for him. He lets him keep the only thing he’s got left – his reticence. Shakespeare’s been down among the dead men himself. He knows that when you’ve been in hell, you don’t talk about it …’
Gabriel wheeled round. His queer ugly face was contorted, his eyes shone with an odd kind of sincerity.
‘You know, Norreys, I’ve never been able to believe in God. God the father, who made the pretty beasts and flowers, God who loves us and takes care of us, God who created the world. No, I don’t believe in that God. But sometimes – I can’t help it – I do believe in Christ … because Christ descended into hell … His love went as deep as that …
‘He promised the repentant thief paradise. But what about the other one? The one who cursed and reviled him. Christ went with him down into hell. Perhaps after that –’
Suddenly Gabriel shivered. He shook himself. His eyes became once more just rather beautiful eyes in an ugly face.
‘I’ve been talking too much,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’
He departed abruptly.
I wondered whether he had been talking about Shakespeare or about himself. I thought, just a little, about himself …
Chapter Twenty
Gabriel had been confident about the result of the election. He had said that he did not see what could go wrong.
The unforeseen in this case was a girl called Poppy Narracott. She was the barmaid at the Smugglers’ Arms at Greatwithiel. She was a girl whom John Gabriel had never seen and did not know existed. Yet it was Poppy Narracott who set the events in motion which placed Gabriel’s chances of election in real jeopardy.
For James Burt and Poppy Narracott were on very close terms. But James Burt, when he had taken too much drink, was rough – sadistically rough. The girl Poppy turned against him. She refused, categorically, to have anything more to do with him, and she stuck to her decision.
Which was why James Burt came home one night rolling drunk and in a raging temper and was further infuriated by the terrified demeanour of his wife Milly. He let himself go. All the fury and balked desire that he felt for Poppy he vented on his wretched wife. He behaved like a complete madman and Milly Burt, small blame to her, lost her head completely.
She thought Jim Burt would kill her.
Twisting herself out of his grasp, she rushed out of the front door into the street. She had no idea of where she was going or to whom to go. To go to the police station would never have occurred to her. There were no near neighbours, only shops closely shuttered at night.
She had nothing but instinct to guide her fleeing footsteps. Instinct took her to the man she loved – the man who had been kind to her. There was no conscious thought in her head, no realization that scandal might result, she was terrified and she ran to John Gabriel. She was a desperate hunted animal looking for sanctuary.
She ran, dishevelled and breathless, into the King’s Arms, and to the King’s Arms Jam
es Burt pursued her, roaring out threats of vengeance.
Gabriel, as it happened, was in the hall.
Personally, I don’t see that John Gabriel could have behaved in any other way than he did. She was a woman he liked, he was sorry for her, and her husband was both drunk and dangerous. When James Burt came roaring in and swore at him and told him to give up his wife, accusing him point blank of being on terms of intimacy with her, Gabriel told him to go to hell, that he wasn’t fit to have a wife, and that he, John Gabriel, was going to see that she was kept safe from him.
James Burt went for Gabriel like a charging bull and Gabriel knocked him down. After that he engaged a room for Mrs Burt and told her to stay in it and lock her door. She couldn’t possibly go back home now, he told her, and everything would come right in the morning.
By the next morning the news was all round St Loo. Jim Burt had ‘found out’ about his wife and Major Gabriel. And Gabriel and Mrs Burt were staying together at the King’s Arms.
You can imagine, perhaps, the effect of this on the eve of the poll. Polling day was in two days’ time.
‘He’s done for himself now,’ Carslake murmured distractedly. He walked up and down my sitting room. ‘We’re finished – licked – Wilbraham’s bound to get in. It’s a disaster – a tragedy. I never liked the fellow. Hairy at the heel. I knew he’d end by letting us down.’
Mrs Carslake, in refined accents, lamented, ‘That’s what comes of having a candidate who isn’t a gentleman.’
My brother seldom took part in our political discussions. If he was present at all he smoked a pipe in silence. But on this occasion he took his pipe out of his mouth and spoke.
‘Trouble is,’ he said, ‘he has behaved like a gentleman.’
It seemed to me then that it was an ironical thought that Gabriel’s more blatant lapses from accepted gentlemanly standards had only increased his standing, but that his isolated piece of quixotic chivalry should be the circumstance to lay him low.
Presently Gabriel himself came in. He was dogged and unrepentant.
The Rose and the Yew Tree Page 15
