Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  ‘How nice to see you again,’ however, was all that she could manage to produce, and, seating herself in the deck chair that the young man had vacated for her, she focused her eyes a little above his wife’s head while the conversation went on around her.

  Sonia, turning to a group behind her, continued her interrupted conversation. ‘I think perhaps,’ she said, ‘I could face it better if it wasn’t that wonderful yellow colour. Somehow I find all those fish bones and bits of old bread so disappointing after the way it looks.’ And, when the others protested ‘you ought to have had it with real langouste, as we did in Bandol,’ and continued, ‘Do you remember, darling, the place where the waitress looked like a tart?’ ‘Not a tart, darling, a poule de luxe,’ Sonia simply said; ‘I expect I just don’t like saffron.’ Let Ella stew in her own self-centred, neurotic juice, she thought, and then realistically – there was nothing Sonia enjoyed so much as a piece of histrionic ‘realism’ – it’s a pity she doesn’t die, it would be better for all of us if she were dead.

  ‘The news about Vardon Hall is good,’ said James to his father. It was all he could bring himself to say. It was impossible to estimate how far this whim of his father’s might damage his own position locally, spoil his chances with the local Conservative Party office, ruin his career. The very thought of his father’s quixotic behaviour – that no doubt was the charming, knight-errant way he would like to regard it – made the veins in his temples throb with anger. All his life he seemed to have been crushed beneath the weight of Father’s career, and now, at last, when he was free and was building his own future, that ‘noble old fighter’ could not deny himself this extra gratification, this selfish piece of charming idealism. ‘Bernard’s always spoiling for a fight. He’ll rise from his death-bed if there’s an injustice to attack,’ Aunt Isobel had said with tears of pride in her eyes. This time, at least, he had hoped against hope that his father would be beaten. He flushed with the unfairness of life. Bernard, who knew what his son was thinking, could only say, ‘Yes, I’m very pleased.’

  But the topic was not to be avoided. Though Bernard was instinctively distrusted by the local gentry, as, with the disappearance of the last few estates, the mixed collection of commuting civil servants, barristers, and stockbrokers, and a smaller intermingling of local farmers felt themselves to be, they yet enjoyed the presence of a public figure among them. If only he had lived up to his position, had specialized in good food, a good cellar, and a ‘philosophy of life’ that took you above everyday things, they would not have minded his talking over their heads, would even have welcomed the reassertion of their prejudices in terms that were a bit out of their depth. They would have liked affirmation of their private conviction that the grievances and grudges they felt against a changing social order should be considered the reawakening of spiritual values. As for the faint rumblings of sexual unorthodoxy, many of them would have been glad to evidence breadth of mind, so long as the testimony was not asked too publicly. ‘Spenlow was telling me the courts are choc-a-bloc with these cases every day, wasting the time of the police. If it wasn’t for this damned Nonconformist government the law would have been changed long ago,’ they would have said; or their wives, ‘Darling, don’t be so egotistical, just because you like one thing…. It’s pathetic, really, more than anything else.’ If only he wouldn’t pour out all this undergraduate rubbish, would be a little more responsible, in fact. Nevertheless, almost all of them remembered occasions when they had ‘got on so well’ with him, when it had been ‘amazing what an intelligent interest he took’ or ‘how amusingly he could sum the others up’.

  It was a young farmer, one of those especially convinced of an understanding with Bernard, who now brought public attention to the unfortunate topic of Vardon Hall. ‘Congratulations, sir,’ he said. ‘When do you hold the Victory celebrations?’ Bernard registered the penalties one incurred for showing off one’s powers with the shy. He remembered that the ‘sir’ had seemed to him a pathetic imitation of public-school behaviour, gleaned from out-of-date novels. He also remembered flattering the young man by entwining his stories of rags at the local agricultural college with his own Cambridge reminiscences. A charming, if rather pathetic, snob, he had thought him. Now, he just seemed a snob. As for the boyishness, Bernard now could see only an oaf. As always, however, his conscience turned in reverse. His own snobbery seemed far more disgusting. He sat down by the young man’s side in expiation.

  ‘Oh,’ Bernard smiled, ‘it’s a victory of the mind, you know; they’re only celebrated by clean living and high thinking, unfortunately.’ He was gratified by the farmer’s smile to note how exactly he had remembered the level of humour to which the young man could aspire. He evidently believed that this was in a range beyond the reach of the rest of the company, though Bernard could have told him that he was wrong. But then the more intelligent men present probably had less charm. In any case if they both got pleasure out of the fake…. Warming up to the encounter, he pushed Vardon Hall and all that concerned himself aside with grinning modesty. ‘What about the Morris Eight?’ he asked. ‘Do you still feel doubtful?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said the boy. ‘It’s definitely no use buying a new car unless you can go into the fifteen-hundred class. If I was going for anything, I’d go for an old Rolls. In any case, our old bus will get by with a new engine….’

  But the diversion was not to succeed. The topic of Vardon Hall was too close to the hearts of everyone. It was the latest symbol of the war they were waging against a changing world. The war that, like the Cold War, was so frightening because so unfamiliar, so bound up with the ordinary process of living. One day the earth would tremble underneath your feet and nothing happened, the next day would seem so calm and yet the social seismograph registered an earthquake.

  ‘I’m afraid I belong to the enemy camp,’ said a youngish stockbroker, dressed in gentleman-farmer riding-breeches and hunting waistcoat. ‘I don’t think the district would have suffered from expanding a little.’ He was slightly uneasy at taking a quick-profits view of the matter, for his position as a season-ticket country gentleman conflicted somewhat with his membership of a local tradesman’s family, from whose chain of shops he still drew profits.

  There was quick dissension among the business and professional men who had no local financial interest.

  One barrister’s wife said, ‘I don’t think I could have borne it if they’d made that terrible hotel and built those dreadful suburban villas. Can’t you imagine them – Mon Repos, Wee Nook, and all the other horrors.’

  ‘Betjeman’s paradise,’ laughed Mrs Rankine, who was literary.

  The stockbroker’s wife, who had only just recently graduated from the suburbs into tweeds, sprang to her husband’s defence. ‘Isn’t that a bit selfish?’ she said. ‘After all it would be nice to have a few real houses after all the never-never houses the dear Government have given us.’ Her husband, who did not read the woman’s weekly from which she had taken the phrase, looked at her with awakened eyes.

  Support for the housing scheme came unexpectedly from little mousey Mrs Graham, who had married from farming into forming. ‘I think it would have woken us all up a little,’ she said. No one could guess how she longed to live in London.

  ‘Please,’ said the barrister’s wife archly, ‘can I go on sleeping?’ Her husband looked away – Hilda’s background showed sometimes in her coy manner.

  Nothing was said, Bernard noticed, of Mrs Curry and her friends; even the most go-ahead apparently preferred to ignore the disreputable centre of their defeated hopes. His emotional sympathies immediately began to dramatize the situation. From Mrs Curry’s cunning and audacity he built a woman of hard intelligence and courage, vulgar – evil even, if you liked – but with a will to power, an ambition outside the range of these pretentious money-grubbers who were ashamed of her.

  ‘I’m glad, of course, that the housing scheme was defeated,’ he said. ‘Apart from caring for my own scheme a lot, I can n
ever lose graciously. But it would have been interesting to see what Mrs Curry made of the Hall. She impresses me as having the vigour and the range of her immense personality.’ The protest once made, the dramatic vision vanished. He knew exactly the sort of second-rate, profiteering road-house Mrs Curry would have made of Vardon Hall.

  ‘Pretty easy to imagine, I should think,’ a retired admiral mumbled, ‘a high class knocking-shop.’ He alone of the party was much older than Bernard, whom he despised as a typical canting usher turned writer.

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said Mrs Rankine, with a little laugh, ‘I’d forgotten you’d been battling with that incredible woman. Is she as impossible as they say?’

  ‘Do they?’ asked Bernard, with a special little smile of intimacy for the questioner, which he had perfected for use when he was out of temper. ‘Impossible for what, I wonder.’

  It was more than James could stomach. The lack of consideration for himself implied in Bernard’s aggravation of the situation overwhelmed him. He and Sonia were perfectly well aware of the vulgar stupidity of the greater part of these local people, quite as well aware as his father, but they were capable of a little civilized tolerance. It was typical of his father’s endless self-deception. All this universal understanding, this Dostoyevskian emotional brotherhood, and, at bottom, he had nothing but utter contempt for nine-tenths of humanity; as for the other tenth he probably hated their guts for not being susceptible to his patronage. Thank God, thought James, he never aimed at understanding humanity. Indeed, the whole appeal of the law, his forte as a barrister, lay in his belief in justice. If people were too weak or too stupid to cope with life as it was, they had to be taught.

  ‘Impossible, I imagine, in any sense which society can tolerate,’ he said sharply. It was the sort of vague, conventional remark which he knew from experience would infuriate his father.

  Bernard raised one heavy dark eyebrow, adding to the deep creases of lined, stretched flesh on his broad, bony forehead. His large dark eyes assumed his favourite ‘mischievous’ twinkle.

  ‘Society, James?’ he asked. ‘Old Vardon? Vardon Bridge End? The Inner Temple? Or the Judges of His Majesty’s Bench?’

  James turned with disgust to open some more lager. It was enough that he had endured this in his childhood–‘He can’t keep order for a minute, Daddy, everyone simply loathes him.’ ‘Everyone, James? All the stern disciplinarians like yourself, of course, who want to be kept in order. But what about the anarchists? The boys who simply loathe order?’ – If his father had remained a schoolmaster, everyone would have seen it for what it was – pedantic bullying; but because he happened to have a talent for writing, it became something quite different – ‘gentle and ironic questioning of our most accepted values’, ‘teasing people out of prejudiced ruts’, and all the rest of the nonsense. You could, it seemed, write whatever came into your head, contradict yourself fundamentally in every successive book, invent people who did things quite out of character, do anything but really think out what you meant, so long as you advertised yourself sufficiently as a humanist. In his anger, James opened one bottle too clumsily, and the foam shot over his grey flannel suit. ‘Blast,’ he said loudly.

  ‘Oh, I know all about goats,’ Sonia was saying. ‘People give them the same recommendation as the billeting officers did with evacuees – they’re no trouble. For all I know it may be true of goats. But then, like evacuees, they smell, and that’s quite enough for me.’ Then, turning to a tall, youngish man, whose dark good looks were running rather quickly to a jowl and a porty flush, ‘Are the Vardons terribly upset, Hubert?’ she asked. ‘It must be awful to have a house that you think is Baedeker and then see it turned down by the National Trust.’ She could have thrashed both James and Bernard for losing their tempers in public. No doubt Ella had liked her men to be just little boys who sulked if they weren’t spoilt, but she preferred adults. To change the subject, however, would have only made them sulk more. She decided wisely to bring the defenders of taste and beauty to her assistance. After all, if they, like the go-ahead commercial group, were opposed to Bernard’s victory, it was a gap that could more easily be closed in a general benevolence towards culture.

  Hubert Rose considered before he spoke. As he always delivered ex cathedra, he liked a moment’s silence before his pronouncements. ‘I think the old lady was rather riled. Thought it rather impudent, don’t y’know? And dear old Jerry, of course, who hadn’t the faintest notion of what was happening, took it as just another example of the ghastly bad manners of today.’ Hubert Rose aimed at pastiche Edwardian in speech. ‘Of course the National Trust were perfectly right,’ he chuckled weightily for a moment. ‘As a matter of fact, they came to me. One or two of them were rather tickled with the project – 1720 house, right period and all that, y’know. But as I pointed out, there was quite a lot of bad design going about then, and Vardon Hall was one of Kent’s off days. It’s high time this myth about eighteenth-century design was knocked on the head. Though I’m sorry, of course, that it should be poor old Mrs Vardon’s head that suffered.’ His normal sneer changed to another that was intended for a smile. ‘I’m delighted that Bernard’s got his poets’ home, myself. One naturally feels alarmed at letting loose a lot of beards and sandals in the village, but, as far as I know, most poets dress like bank clerks. A good few of them probably are, anyway.’ He paused and swallowed his half-pint with gusto. Hubert was a great one for wallop and darts with the villagers in the local. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘you can’t rely on bank clerks, or their women-folk, nowadays, when they’re on holiday. Three-quarters of them wouldn’t be allowed on the beach at San Sebastian. Extraordinary what good sense the Catholic Church shows when it comes to aesthetics.’

  If Hubert was not liked, he was felt to be all right. As a successful architect too, he knew what he was talking about. One or two of the lovers of the past, who had felt the National Trust’s rejection of Vardon Hall as a personal affront, began to veer round. An Assistant Secretary at the Board of Trade, who kept up with modern poetry, said, ‘It fills the gap we’ve all been so disturbed about. We can’t bring the patrons back; we don’t, God knows, want the State; so we have a nice little mixture of the two. The best sort of English compromise. Excuse me,’ he added, smiling at Bernard, ‘I know it can’t have been easy for you with all this local objection. But then, that’s rather English too. Always put up the maximum opposition to anything you see going ahead. It works out wonderfully in practice. I know I like nothing better than to watch any little bill the Minister’s shepherding through the House being opposed like hell, even if I’ve drafted it myself. It’s amazing how right they are in the clauses they chuck out; especially,’ and he laughed in self-deprecation, ‘my own little pet ones. May I, in any case, as a former opponent, officially congratulate you?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Bernard. The amazing provincialism of the man’s views had rendered him almost speechless. Local opposition indeed! And clearly they all believed it. After fighting the Arts Council, after weary hours at King’s High Table and in All Souls’ Common Room, after promenades in Neville’s Court and Tom Quad, after portentous meals at the Athenaeum and catty ones at the Reform, after rallying what remained of Bloomsbury, New Writing, and Horizon, after Treasury interviews and, God knew quite why, discussions with the Ministry of Labour – this fellow ought at least to know of those – he talked of local opposition.

  ‘I’m completely selfish, I’m afraid,’ said Mrs Rankine, rushing to the defence of culture, ‘I know I’m going to have a chance of hearing music and readings and talks that I shouldn’t have done otherwise and so I’m delighted.’

  ‘Yes, so am I,’ said Bernard, ‘it’s the Summer session – the concerts, talks, and readings – on which we rely to get a little of our money back. I hope,’ he added, Peter Pan asking for Tinkerbell’s life, ‘that now we have been born, even if we were unwanted, you will at least help to keep us alive.’

  There was a general murmur of assent.
It was after all a distinction for the neighbourhood. There had been quite a correspondence in The Times and in the Telegraph, and some criticism in the Daily Express, so nobody present felt quite out of the national limelight.

  ‘The papers have done you proud certainly,’ said the stockbroker’s wife, and then stopped, for she remembered a particular reason for being disturbed. The Daily Express had shown quite clearly that the whole affair was connected with this dreadful Peace Appeal; the New Statesman or Reynolds’ News or some terrible paper had given it all away. Apparently the Daily Worker had taken it up and said it was just what the government ought to be doing – thank heaven even they had at least got enough shame not to spend good money on nonsense like that – and that Russia had a number of such country houses for writers, only bigger and better than Vardon Hall.

  There was a general hush. Mention of the newspapers had reminded many of the others of this disturbing political aspect of the new scheme. Bernard, guessing at their thoughts, was too annoyed to come to his own defence. Stupid lot of Fascists, he thought, and then smiled at his own prejudice. Even in an emergency, he reflected, even driven into a corner, not more than one or two would really act in a manner that could be described under the easy label ‘Fascist’: Hubert Rose, perhaps, out of cleverness; the young stockbroker and his wife out of stupidity; for the same reason, maybe, his boyish young farmer – here he smiled wryly again – but not one of the others. And yet many of the most intelligent of these men and women were ready at the slightest crisis to label him, or any other person whom they associated, however vaguely, with their anxieties, as Communist. He smiled at his own moralizing. It would not take much encouragement, he suspected, to have him on his feet, exhorting them all to unity in the face of common danger. But then, he decided, who could say where such unity lay? What would decide their choice in that threatened future when choice would almost have gone? These people thought Hubert Rose a ‘sound’ man, yet he could swear that the cleverness and the sneer concealed a far deeper hatred and inferiority than theirs, a ruthless fright that would have no consideration for ideas of liberty and humanity. But what did he know of his own son James, if his career were at stake? On his own ‘progressive’ side, too, he would swear to the innate decency of his sister Isobel; yet how did he know into what political enormities her failure, her defeated possessiveness, might eventually lead her. In the last resort, it would need intelligence, courage, and pity in order to stand firm, and a little too much of any of the three would push one over the edge. Possibly it was this fundamental social distrust and unease that explained his irrational sense of evil in these last months. He suspected all the same that its roots lay deeper.