‘Young men can be sensitive in matters of that sort. Particularly if it is suggested that their own Joneses are not the Joneses who alone count.’
‘Good heavens, Mary! You can’t imagine I hinted anything like that.’
‘Of course not, dear.’
‘He’s a nice enough boy, as I say, and may suit Clarrie very well. If he does, I shan’t care twopence if he’s an entirely new man. The career open to talent is one of the great strengths of our society. It’s an immensely stabilising thing. Without it, our sort might all be dangling from lamp-posts by now. And the conception ought undoubtedly to be extended to—well, the domestic sanctities, and matrimonial alliance, and whatever grand name one cares to give the thing.’
‘I am sure that is the wise view, Bernard. And we must just wait and see how the matter develops.’
‘Exactly. And we must make another attempt to get him down to Graziers. Meantime, my mind is quite at ease about it all.’ Sir Bernard, who had taken a second glass of port during this after-dinner colloquy, nodded confidently. He was a little silent, however, during the rest of the evening.
Lady Balmayne was accustomed to this. It was the way her husband often behaved when he had a difficult professional problem on his hands. Usually it was how to make a new church, however designed, look like a church at all. But sometimes, she knew, it was a problem even more difficult than that. An architect nowadays frequently finds himself involved in, or at least on the fringes of, enterprises that strike him as of a morally dubious character. Sir Bernard’s own ethical standards were very strict; there had even been times when this had made things hard for him; ultimately it had contributed to the high regard in which he was held by his colleagues. Here he prized his standing very much – and the more because he saw his instinctive and untroubled honesty as a matter of upbringing. He was proud, indeed, of what might fairly be called ancient lineage – which, paradoxically, was the very circumstance that would have rendered him of an open mind about a prospective son-in-law from among the most simply bred. But at the same time he was more proud of his father than of all his other progenitors put together.
That father, Raymond Balmayne, was a seventh son, and when no more than a boy fate perched him on a high stool in the counting-house of a large mercantile concern. It was the sort of position celebrated by John Davidson in the poem called ‘Thirty Bob a Week’, and if young Raymond didn’t quite have to make do on that he had a lean time of it, all the same. It ought not to be said of him, in the common phrase, that he ‘fought his way up’, since this suggests a tooth-and-claw attitude from which he was constitutionally aloof. But he made his way. It was a way which, but for the stimulus of family tradition, might finally have established him as a much respected head clerk, honourably devoted to an employer’s interests. As it was, he did better. He did better because he took risks – just as earlier Balmaynes, it might be claimed, had taken risks in battle or on the hunting-field. Nobody had ever so much as hinted that they were other than honest risks. For quite a long time, and after he was in the enjoyment of a substantial prosperity, there had been difficult corners to turn: the last of them when his eldest son, Bernard, was already a young man. He had no desire to see Bernard succeed him in what would thus have become a family business; he would much rather have had the boy make a career for himself in the Army or the Church or at the Bar. Nevertheless he was content with the choice Bernard eventually made. Had he insisted otherwise, Bernard would probably have obeyed, even to the extent of getting into a dog-collar. For Bernard had been (as people then said) strictly brought up, and he accepted his father’s wisdom as unhesitatingly as he did his rigid moral code.
On this particular evening, and with the weighty business of Roland Redpath before him, Sir Bernard Balmayne may have been turning over aspects of this past history in his mind. He may have been a little wondering about Ronnie – a good-hearted lad, but one in whom family pieties and the duty of strenuous endeavour were not prominent. But much more he was wondering about Claribel, and what awaited her with an almost unknown young man. Sir Bernard had been lacking in candour when he told his wife that his mind was quite at ease in the matter. What troubled him was not the now patent fact that Redpath’s background was undistinguished; it was simply that this aspirant to his daughter’s hand (as he was certainly going to turn out to be) had disclosed no background at all. A family tradition declaring generations of labour on the soil would have been acceptable in its fashion. A mere taken-for-granted blank was not.
Sir Bernard and Lady. Balmayne went to bed. Sir Bernard was not so preoccupied as to neglect the closing ritual of their day. It consisted in his reading aloud to his wife for an hour before they turned the lights out. They were both fond of biographies and memoirs, but for this nightcap occasion (as Lady Balmayne called it) they generally chose fiction: sometimes recent novels, but more commonly the ‘standard’ sort. In this way they had read, and sometimes re-read, many of the major Victorians, and Trollope had recently become their favourite. On this night, as it happened, a new novel had to be begun. They had decided on The Prime Minister, which Sir Bernard had read long ago but which was unknown to his wife. He collected the volume from his library now, and as he made his way upstairs he opened it and glanced at the table of chapter headings. ‘Chapter I: Ferdinand Lopez,’ he read, and was instantly appalled.
A moment before, he would have said that the story was all about Plantagenet’s difficulties as First Minister of the Crown, and how they were increased by the impulsive and indiscreet behaviour of his wife, now Duchess of Omnium but still known to her intimates as Lady Glen. Nothing of the sort. Ferdinand Lopez (an unpromising name) starts the story. And when the fifth chapter is headed ‘No one knows anything about him’ the reference is to Lopez still. Recalling this and much else, Sir Bernard was prompted to return the book to the shelf and choose another Trollope instead. What about He Knew He was Right? It was doubtful whether the old boy had ever written a better book. But, in a way, He Knew He was Right would be almost as bad. It was about another nice girl landed with an unknown quantity as a husband. He is, indeed, a man of family, but spends the greater part of the book playing Othello to his wife’s Desdemona, and then goes slowly and tediously mad. So Sir Bernard abandoned the idea of a switch, entered his wife’s bedroom, and explained what was in prospect for her with as much lightness of air as he could assume. Lady Balmayne was amused.
‘But, Bernard,’ she said, ‘Trollope abounds in girls who make disastrous marriages and then face up to them quite idiotically and with enormous courage. And I’m sure this Ferdinand Lopez isn’t in the least like Roland Redpath. I expect Trollope thinks of him as a Portuguese Jew.’
‘I’m not certain about the Jew – but Portuguese, certainly. Only the point is that his origins are totally unknown. Listen.’ Sir Bernard opened the book. ‘Here’s page three. “Though a great many men and not a few women knew Ferdinand Lopez very well, none of them knew whence he had come, or what was his family.”’
‘I don’t see it need have mattered in the least.’
‘And this.’ Sir Bernard turned the page, unheeding. ‘”It was known to some few that he occupied rooms in a flat in Westminster, but to very few where the rooms were situated.” And the girl’s father, a widower and a respectable barrister of West-country stock, has to blame himself bitterly for weakly permitting her to marry a totally unknown man. Lopez moves in good society for a time, you see, because the Duchess foolishly takes him up. But he turns out to be a most atrocious scoundrel.’
‘Bernard, dear, we don’t know much about Roland, and I have agreed that it’s rather worrying. But we can be as sure of his not being an atrocious scoundrel as we are that he doesn’t live in a flat in Westminster. So do get into bed and begin the book.’
Sir Bernard did as he was told.
‘”Chapter I: Ferdinand Lopez,”’ he read. ‘”It is certainly of service to a man to know who were his grandfathers and who were his grandmothers if
he entertain an ambition to move in the upper circles of society . . .”’ As Sir Bernard read on he began to find Trollope as soothing as he commonly did. But he was conscious that the little fuss he had made betrayed him as obstinately feeling that there was trouble ahead for Claribel – just as there was for Emily Wharton when Lopez made her his bride.
‘I’m bound to say that I’ve been studying your father a little,’ Roland Redpath said.
‘Studying Daddy? You’d do much better to talk to him.’ Claribel had lately become a little disenchanted with Roland’s studious habit. They were in a pub now because he was going to write a paper on people in pubs. He didn’t seem to be getting any fun out of it. Claribel, who (under his escort, it was true) had discovered herself to be quite good at actually conversing with unknown people in public bars, enjoyed these occasions much more. ‘And I don’t see,’ she went on, ‘that lately you’ve been giving yourself much chance of studying him, anyway. He must feel you’re avoiding him.’
‘He has said that?’ Roland asked quickly.
‘Of course not. Daddy wouldn’t say such a thing to me, although of course he might to Mummy. I just have a sense of it.’
‘Does he think I want to seduce you, without being bothered by your family?’
‘There have been one or two young men about whom he did feel that, I know. But you’re not one of them, Roland darling. I suppose it’s humiliating, but you have to face it honestly. You’re rather nice.’
‘All right, all right.’ Being much in love, Roland found all Claribel’s jokes wonderful. ‘But it is dodgy, all the same. You can’t deny it. There’s nothing more natural than that your parents should take it for granted you’ll marry a man of their own class.’
‘You and my father are of precisely the same class. You are both well-regarded professional men.’
‘That’s just an evasion, Claribel dear.’
‘It’s you that’s evasive, Roland. We’ve only to go head on with a simple no-fuss announcement, and there can’t possibly be any trouble at all. I’d agree that I’d be rather upset if Daddy did come down on the thing in a weighty way, and I know that you’re being so cautious because you want to spare me any risk of that. But it’s a misconception of my father’s character. I’m almost inclined to tell you that you haven’t studied him quite enough.’
‘I believe you’re right.’ Staring into his pint pot, Roland said this with the brisk decision of the competent scientist he was. ‘It’s true there’s nothing to be gained by delay. But I rather favour the old-fashioned thing.’
‘What old-fashioned thing, darling? I don’t believe I know her.’
‘Don’t be silly. The modern custom, of course, is just for the girl to tell her parents – probably on the telephone. But I think that, in the circumstances, I ought to have a go at your father first.’
‘And seek his permission to kneel at my feet? Roland, what an old funny you are.’
‘You know perfectly well I shan’t make a stilted fool of myself. But, as I say, in the circumstances—’
‘Jesus, Roland – what circumstances? Have you a dark secret?’
‘I have, in a way.’
‘Is it about your people? You have been rather cagey, you know. Nothing except that joke about being late-risen from the people, like the nobleman in Mr Wopsel’s Hamlet. ‘
‘Your memory’s pretty good. I could make a first-rate research assistant of you, if it came to a pinch.’
‘Stick to the point. Your father was – or is – what used to be called a common working man. Right?’
‘Well, no—I don’t think he’d have seen himself as that. He’d have seen himself – for he’s dead, of course – as a cut above it. Or two cuts above it, for that matter. Unfortunately your father, and this is what really worries me, will instinctively see it precisely the other way round. My father was a menial, Claribel.’
‘A menial? What an absurd word!’
‘It’s not an absurd idea. A ploughboy is of greater dignity than a buttons, and a navvy than a flunkey.’
‘Was your father a flunkey, Roland?’
‘He was a butler – and that’s worse. A young flunkey, or a buttons, can run away, join the army, and become a Field Marshal. A butler is fixed in his little pantry for good, rinsing the decanters and counting the spoons.’
‘Roland, this conversation is completely mad! It simply doesn’t belong to this age at all.’
‘Oh, doesn’t it?’ The butler’s son checked himself, conscious of an unduly sardonic note. ‘Shall I get you another lager and lime?’
‘No thank you, Jeeves.’ This joke came from Claribel a little uncertainly. It was only just dawning on her that Roland saw this nonsense as very serious indeed. ‘Do you have dreams,’ she asked (remembering her lover’s profession) ‘in which you are a butler yourself?’
‘No, I do not. The thing doesn’t haunt me, and I can promise not to bore you with it in future. Still, it’s a legacy aspects of which do irk me from time to time. My name, for instance.’
‘Your Christian name?’
‘Oh, that! Well, no. Roland, I believe, was the name of a hunter belonging to one of my father’s employers and much admired in the servants’ hall. No – it’s my surname. I oughtn’t to be Redpath. I ought to be Hedgepath.’
‘Hedgepath? There’s no such name – or at least there’s no such thing. There are hedgerows and footpaths and bridleways, but—’
‘It’s a rare but genuine rustic surname in Herefordshire and round about. I suppose my father thought it odd, since he made the change, it seems. I’m sensitive about Redpath, as if it was a kind of theft. How bloody irrational we can be.’
‘Yes, can’t we? And even my father, I suppose. I do think it may give him a jolt – but not more than that. Do you know what he’ll profess to be curious about? It will be whether your father was a good butler. “If the fellow was a good butler,” he’ll say, “he was a rare bird. And there’s all the more chance his son will be a good psychologist.” Mark my words, that’s how Daddy will carry it off.’
‘”Carry it off” is about right, no doubt. And he ought to be able to find out easily enough.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Oh, nothing.’ For the first time in Claribel’s experience of him Roland Redpath was suddenly confused. ‘Darling, let’s forget the whole thing for a bit. Are you sure you won’t have another drink?’
Claribel shook her head slowly. But her mind worked quite fast, and it seemed to her that there was a mystery here that ought to be cleared up at once.
‘Roland,’ she said, ‘is there something more to this than you’ve told me? I don’t mean that what you have told me is important at all, or need ever have been mentioned. But is there something else; something a little odder, which produces all this caution about my father – and that you really should, perhaps, have told me about, but haven’t?’
‘Yes, there is.’ Roland was self-possessed again, and his main disposition appeared to be to admire Claribel’s clarity. ‘My father wasn’t just anybody’s butler. He was your grandfather’s butler. It’s as absurd as that.’
If it was an absurdity it yet wasn’t, to Claribel’s mind, an absurdity to keep under one’s hat. She hated the thought of Roland’s concealing it from her during their brief courtship, and equally she hated the thought of his considering it ‘dodgy’ in relation to her parents. Perhaps it was – just a little. But, even so, Roland ought not to have hesitated to present his small piece of family history to them in a perfectly matter-of-fact way. There was something almost servile in an impulse to be prudent and contriving about disclosing such a thing.
But Claribel was her father’s daughter, and alert to the danger of allowing injustices or even petty unfairness to harbour in the mind. The notion that Roland’s circumspection represented a kind of hereditary taint – equating him, in fact, with a groom who awaits a favourable moment before disclosing that he has neglected a horse – would be an abe
rration more shocking than she had ever fallen into before. Roland was quite blameless in being a little hesitant before the situation in which he found himself. Marrying into the family in which your father has been a servant can’t be at all common, and when it does happen it is probably the consequence of some antecedent sexual misconduct. It was perfectly sensible in Roland to feel that he must mind his step.
Claribel didn’t at all mean, however, to do this herself. She regarded the ball as now being in her court – she had told Roland so at once – and she proposed to bang it straight back over the net. She did so the following morning at breakfast – sitting between her parents and while passing her mother the toast. She had become engaged to Roland Redpath and intended that the marriage should take place quite soon. When he returned to his provincial university in a few days’ time she was going to go with him and they’d look for a house. And a curious fact had turned up. Roland’s father’s original name had been Hedgepath, not Redpath. And he had been Grandad’s butler long ago. Perhaps Daddy remembered him.
This was all a shade bald, and might have produced a silence longer than it did. Lady Balmayne would have spoken at once had she not felt able to rely on her husband’s doing so with only the briefest pause.
‘Clarrie, dear,’ Sir Bernard said, ‘we have been expecting this, so it’s no surprise and we are very happy about it. We have seen enough of Roland to know that he’s an excellent young man, and I don’t doubt that his father was an excellent butler. But my memory of the senior Redpath, or Hedgepath, is quite vague. His being with the family was, as you say, a long time ago. Which is perhaps just as well, on the whole.’
The Bridge at Arta Page 14
