‘My mother knew,’ Mrs Verity said.
‘You mean that you know?’ It had taken Shand a moment to grasp the implication, and his first sensation was of sharp relief. ‘I’m telling you nothing new?’
‘My dear Professor, I didn’t say that. Put it, if you like, that my mother would know. She was a remarkable woman.’
‘Most certainly. She was widely felt to be so.’ Shand made a clutch at his familiar decencies. ‘A kind of Meredithian heroine.’
‘Perhaps. But I think that Aeschylean would be my own definition.’
‘Indeed?’ It was only after a moment that Shand managed even this. Mrs Verity’s last words had come to his ear like gibberish, so that he had been obliged to reach after them, consider them in phonetic terms, and finally make at least grammatical sense of them. Mrs Verity, he recalled, had been at Girton (in Miss Jones’s time) and couldn’t be wholly vague about the dramatist of the Oresteia. It seemed a batty remark, all the same. Not that Mrs Verity looked batty. She merely looked rather grim. It was a consciousness of this that prompted what Shand went on to say. ‘I’m afraid you may judge me impertinent in bringing up this matter at all. But the man I mentioned—’
‘A Mr Fawdry, I think you said? I quite understand.’ Mrs Verity’s countenance remained inexpressive. She was giving nothing away. ‘Will you please tell me, Professor, just what you know?’
Shand began to do so, and his performance improved at once. He had an orderly mind. Once a week, during two terms out of three, he was a lucid if unexciting lecturer. With decent brevity he lectured now. William Mainprize was begotten, born, passed through his malting-house, and hanged – all within ten minutes. Even so, there had been a pause while the ancient parlourmaid brought in a tray. It was rather as when, in common room, the coffee had been brought in. Pas devant les domestiques.
‘It will be backwards from A Venation of Centaurs, and from the trial, that this Mr Fawdry, too, will work?’ Mrs Verity asked. She had, when one thought of it, a Girton way of phrasing things. And whether she had been staggered or not – whether, indeed, anything new had been broken to her – it was impossible to say.
‘I’m afraid so. When it’s a question only of the last hundred years there’s almost nobody, whether gentle or simple, about whom the basic facts may not be discovered through dogged inquiry. Fawdry will have both William Mainprize’s parentage and his ultimate function in A Venation of Centaurs to play with. I can only suggest that the facts be first given to the world in a dignified way.’
‘By yourself, Professor?’
‘I would gladly avoid the task. But I am, conceivably, the most appropriate man to undertake it. I can assure you that I experience no pleasure in the contemplation of it.’
But Mrs Verity appeared not quite to have been listening. She had risen, and was crossing the room. Her posture was upright and her step firm. The movement revealed her as a very old lady, all the same.
‘I have one or two things to show you,’ Mrs Verity said.
3
With a twinge of discomfort, Shand recalled Martha Mainprize’s relics. For he was being shown very much the same class of object now. Only whereas Martha’s possessions had been retrieved from dust and mildew in a cheap deal cupboard, these were preserved in a formidably locked steel receptacle, leather-sheathed and velvet lined. For a moment something naked in the contrast shocked him, and then he concentrated upon the exhibits. Again there was a diary – this one finely-tooled and residually fragrant – and again there were photographs. Some of the photographs were small and primitive, others large and primitive. The more modern included both snapshots and formal studio affairs. There were various views of places and buildings too.
‘My mother had the instinct of an annalist,’ Mrs Verity was saying in her Girton manner. ‘Whether in one medium or another, little was let pass unrecorded.’ She picked out one of the oldest of the larger photographs and handed it to Shand. The surface had darkened in some places and in others faded, so that for a moment it suggested only a messy confluence of chocolates, milk and plain. ‘The servants in 1871,’ Mrs Verity said. She seemed to be quoting from memory some inscription barely decipherable in a margin. ‘Martha Mainprize on the left in the back row.’ She made a gesture which closed the quotation and allowed her to continue in her own person. ‘So of course my mother knew. She knew everything. And of course I know. I must apologise, Professor, for having dissimulated. The record is only too clear about a number of things. Although some of the photographs, indeed, perplex me still.’
Shand had been regarding the stiffly posed group intently. There was a butler in the middle – in his early twenties the butler’s grandson had attained to a butler – and two or three outdoor servants had been brought in. So it was a socially imposing affair. And there could be no doubt about Martha Mainprize; on the strength of a photograph glimpsed in the humbler collection, Shand recognised her at once.
‘Martha Mainprize shortly before her death, with William aged five.’ Mrs Verity handed another photograph. ‘But I must make the tea, or Evans will be displeased.’ And Mrs Verity turned aside. The tea equipage which the decrepit parlourmaid had brought in was an elaborate affair, and ought to have been much beyond her strength. Mrs Verity absorbed herself with a silver kettle and fine china. Shand took a good look at William Mainprize aged five, and put the photograph down. There was something unnerving about this archive – and there had been something unnerving about one of Mrs Verity’s remarks on it. She had said that some of the photographs perplexed her still. He felt a sudden irrational conviction that further revelation lurked here – matters still mercifully screened from Walter Corderoy’s daughter, but the significance of which he himself, with his specialised knowledge, might discern instantly, and must be on his guard not to betray.
Obeying an impulse equally irrational, Shand thrust his hand into the pile of photographs as yet unexamined, and drew out one at random. It was of a stretch of landscape with some large structure in the middle. Before he had scrutinised this, before he had distinguished the stunted barred windows and the ugly octagonal tower, he knew what he was looking at. It was a prison. For a moment he lost his head, was on the point of crumpling the thing up and stuffing it into a pocket. Then he remembered that Mrs Verity knew what had befallen whom in Winchester Gaol; that this visit to her had been pointless, since she had nothing more to learn about the fate of her father’s bastard son. But he continued to look at the photograph, strangely disturbed. It was sufficiently surprising that Corderoy’s wronged wife should have assembled and preserved even those early memorials of her husband’s peasant mistress and their child. It was surely a fantastic morbidity to have added that last grim pendant to the collection.
Something had gone wrong with a little spirit lamp required for the tea-ritual, and Mrs Verity was detained by it a moment or two longer. The diary he could not venture to open, but he turned over some further photographs. There was William Mainprize as a junior schoolboy and as a senior one. In the second of these phases William ought to have turned gawky, but hadn’t. And in the next in the series – it must date from his malting-house days – he was a very handsome youth indeed. He was also undeniably his eminent father’s son. Shand picked up one further photograph. It had evidently been enlarged from a snapshot, and had something of an impromptu and even hurried air. The setting appeared to be a walled garden. A matronly lady was standing beside a rustic seat. Even in her elaborate costume – which might belong to the early 1890’s, Shand supposed – it was evident that she was pregnant. Beside her was the unmistakable figure of William Mainprize, now really grown-up. His arm was familiarly round her waist, but his gaze was over his shoulder and out of the picture. He might have been poised to bolt. It was a displeasingly furtive scene.
An appalled sense of revelation came to Shand. Here was something which the old woman now tinkling her teacups had failed to tumble to. And she must never, never do so! But as he was about to thrust the photograp
h back among the others he found that Mrs Verity was again standing beside him.
‘That one,’ she said. ‘I am perplexed, I own.’
‘Indeed?’ Even to his own ear, Shand’s casualness of response sounded absurdly bogus. ‘Probably it has drifted in accidentally and has no connection—’
‘I mean that I am perplexed as to whom my mother could have trusted to take it. A confidential servant, no doubt. But it was extremely rash. Perhaps it was what actually led to the discovery.’
‘The discovery?’ Shand was conscious of the odd fact that his face had gone cold. It was as if somebody had poured ether on it. Presumably, he thought with dismay, it was betraying a deadly pallor. And now Mrs Verity was looking at him.
‘We needn’t lose our heads,’ she said drily. ‘It will be a long time before your Mr Fawdry lays hands on that.’ And she pointed to the photograph.
‘It’s the only positive—?’
‘There is also the diary.’
‘Mrs Verity, ought you not—?’ Shand had glanced at the comfortable fire burning in the drawing-room grate. ‘Would it not be wise—?’
‘Certainly not, Professor. I am not of a mind to destroy any part of English literary history.’ Rather strangely, Mrs Verity smiled. ‘But I confess that, while I remain on earth, I am willing to sit on it.’
‘That is your mother?’ Shand had turned back to stare at the photograph.
‘Certainly it’s my mother. She was a remarkable woman, as I said.’
‘Yes, of course.’ Shand remembered the remark about Aeschylus. Clytemnestra, he dimly thought, didn’t have much of an edge on Walter Corderoy’s wife.
‘While my mother was still a young bride in his house, her husband seduced one of the servants, Martha Mainprize. My mother waited, and herself seduced the young man who had been the fruit of that seduction. It is possible that she proclaimed the fact – announced to her husband that she was carrying William Mainprize’s child. Certainly the young man was banished, as you know.’
‘And the tragedy darkened again, long after.’ Momentarily into Shand’s head came the image of his colleague the Casaubon Professor of Greek, chattering about protasis and epitasis. But this was at once ousted by something else: a simple summoning up and comparing of dates, such as his work required of him daily. His eyes turned to the pregnant woman in the photograph, and then back to Mrs Verity. And on her they rounded. For Mrs Verity – Lavinia Corderoy – was not Walter Corderoy’s daughter but his grand-daughter. And her actual father – Corderoy’s illegitimate son and the lover of Corderoy’s wife – lay in quicklime at Winchester.
But Mrs Verity, evidently for long cognizant of this remarkable parentage, was composedly pouring tea. She handed Shand his cup, turned round, and picked up a plate.
‘Ah,’ Mrs Verity said, ‘cucumber sandwiches.’
A Change of Heart
1
‘A change of heart.’
It seemed to Michael Firth that someone had spoken these words – or rather was in process of speaking these words – behind his left ear. The position had been chosen so that the speaker could remain invisible. He could remain invisible (the voice was a man’s and sounded familiar) because Firth was for some reason unable to turn his head. There was a pain in Firth’s head – suddenly a very bad pain.
The voice swam away into silence. For some time only a cunningly devised instrument (and the place was full of such things, hummed with them, had emanating from them the smell of dryness that complex electrical apparatus can produce) could have detected that anything at all was going on inside Firth. Then Firth was back being Firth, and aware of strange surroundings. Or he was aware of an astonishing discontinuity in his experience. Only a split second ago he had been doing he hadn’t a recollection what. But nothing connected with this. This was grave attention centred on him, and figures in white clothes, and again that hum with its queer smell, and as well as the smell of the hum an ordinary hospital smell as well.
So that was it! ‘I’ve had an accident,’ Firth told himself – and knew that his split second might really represent days or weeks. ‘A street accident,’ he amplified. This time his own voice, which was rather like the other one, swam away, but now he was fleetingly aware of his consciousness as deliberately withdrawing within its inviolate subliminal intricacies. ‘No more coma,’ he told himself reassuringly. ‘I’m merely falling asleep.’
A change of heart . . . It surprised Firth – during another of the short spells of what he hoped was clear thinking – that the words were obsessing him like a small trickle of icy water from which it was impossible to edge away. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know why they were in his mind. They had been a joke, and if he himself hadn’t liked the joke – well, that was only an instance of his being edgy these days. Overwork, he supposed. Back from the office late, and then, tiresomely often, one of Camilla’s parties. And they had missed out on their routine winter cruise. He had told himself he was glad of that, since he had a feeling that a luxury cruise, sold on the persuasions of glossy brochures, was a banal and vulgar way of easing off. But perhaps it had been a mistake, and he had succumbed to mounting fatigue. Perhaps the rubbery-smelling brochures were right, and business men really did so succumb unless they regularly performed those latterday pilgrimages of which the shrines were Pacific islands, and the rituals sticky nights in which you sat (decorously with your wife beside you) watching dusky beauties agitating their naked haunches in reputedly indigenous dances. However that might be, it is true that you can step off the kerb inadvisedly when dead tired. Probably a bus had got him – at least sometimes it felt as bad as that. He must ask them. So far as he could remember, they hadn’t yet told him anything about it. Perhaps it was a memory of the bus that had been getting into his head every now and then as the sound of a roaring engine seemingly bearing down on him.
But about that other sound in his head: those insistent self-reiterating words. He and Camilla had gone down to Spindle, their country cottage, and at once there had been a party. Camilla was sensitive to the aspersion that they were mere come-and-go townees when at Spindle; that her husband was no more than a mini-version of a weekend squire. The dozen acres on which he let old Hayball (who pottered for them) keep goats and a straggly free-range poultry, Camilla liked to refer to as the farm. He had even heard her refer to Hayball as the manager. Or had it been the agent? Camilla’s distortions of reality, commonly small and dangerous like a distance marginally misjudged at night, occasionally became monstrous and rather funny, as if she were an animated hall of mirrors in a fair. Anyway, she always summoned the neighbours well in advance to a party to be held the moment the Firths themselves arrived at Spindle. This time, the guests had been upon them almost before Firth could get a fire going in the big fireplace. There was apple-wood, which gratified Camilla because it is supposed to be a pleasing and superior stuff to be in a position to burn.
Suddenly, as he remembered this, the smell of ether and disinfectants faded on Michael Firth, and the smell of the apple-wood was in his nostrils instead. Whether pleasing or not, there was too much of it, since the main chimney at Spindle was distinguished by picturesque rather than functional qualities. He was hurrying round the low drawing-room like a fumigated ferret, trying to coax away the smoke by opening one window and closing another, when people began to arrive.
Camilla was extending her territory. These were the gentry from about three miles around; when she got to ten miles, he supposed, she would start to feel that she was establishing herself on a county basis. Already there was the authentic weekend squire, who was a simple character comfortably niched in a harmless corner of a large family concern in the city. There was the squire’s wife, who had written a book about being somebody’s daughter in some embassy or other after the Kaiser’s War or before Hitler’s – Firth could never remember which. There were people who trained horses, or bred horses, or – more grandly – owned horses and raced them: these tended, when not barking at one a
nother briefly, to freeze into a glassy-eyed immobility, like children playing Grandmother’s Steps. There were two commuting dons who worked in the University of London, men with an air of waiting, perfectly amiably and tolerantly, for something to be said worth saying; these had clever young wives, clothed in garments obtained in interesting foreign places, and with fast reaction-times and hostile impulses. There were several elderly couples, returned in a battered or at least discouraged condition from outposts of a disintegrating Commonwealth. There was Dr Roxburgh, the local G.P. And of course there was the vicar, Mr Baxendale.
Firth got all these people drinks as rapidly as he could. He had nothing against them except that they were a completely heterogeneous lot, brought together – like a random basketful of wild flowers and weeds and fungi – on no basis other than that of fortuitous topographical contiguity. Camilla liked this, and would refer to it as a challenge; she too hurried round, intent on making her party ‘go’. Like the apple-wood fire, the party after a fashion went.
‘Where the pigs be many the wash runs thin.’ One of the horse-training characters said this as he accepted a drink. Firth thought it an odd sort of pleasantry; he was aware that there was a crush in the room, but was hardly prepared to have his martinis reflected upon in this way. It turned out, however, that he had got the bearing of the remark wrong. This often happened to him at parties. His guest was talking about Hayball’s nephew, Luke Hayball, an able-bodied man now unemployed and alleged to have become scandalously disinclined for anything else. Luke had six children, and such were the iniquities of a socialist government that he got less wages when he worked than relief when he didn’t. So the point was that the proverb no longer held true. The more numerous the pigs – meaning the little Hayballs – the thicker the wash provided for them by an over-indulgent community.
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