Hemlock and After

by Angus Wilson

  A tiny little frown of anger appeared on Mrs Curry’s smooth forehead. ‘Now, boys and girls,’ she cried, ‘what about some choruses? Don’t move, Mr Warner, I’ll put the whisky at your side. You get Use to teach you how to say Ich liebe. It’s the same in every language, isn’t it? We can do with a bit of love in this crazy old world, can’t we, Mr Redfern?’ ‘We can indeed,’ said the local draper – a Chapel man – whose butterfly collar had got stained with beer. ‘If we don’t have love we’ll have war.’ It was on the tip of Mrs Curry’s tongue to say ‘Why not?’ but instead she put her arm round the waist of a thin, anaemic blonde whose orange lipstick clashed with her wine-red dress. ‘This is little Coral, Mr Redfern,’ she said; ‘poor little dear, she doesn’t seem to have anyone to love her. All dressed up and nowhere to go eh, dear? Sit down by Mr Redfern and make yourself cosy.’

  As a matter of fact, Mrs Curry was very partial to wars. There was always such a real need for love in war-time. Of the two great ones, she had preferred the First – what with the Red Cross and the boys on Blighty leave – but the Second had been very nice too, with all the G.I.s and the boys in blue. These old choruses they were singing brought it all back to her.

  She moved over to the piano to join in, her enormous body passing between the pretty little tables with miraculous ease. ‘Pack up your troubles’, ‘A Long, Long Trail’, and ‘The Little Grey Home in the West’ were the tunes that brought tears to her eyes. But a party was a time for laughter and fun, so she obliged them all with ‘What was it the Colonel told the Adjutant?’ She was rather hurt when young Mr Cleaver, who ran the garage at Grayley and knew all about petrol, said, ‘And now what about something we can remember?’ She was happy, however, to join in the ‘White Cliffs’ and ‘We’ll meet again’, and even in ‘Buttons and Bows’, but when they began to play Charlestons she decided to put her foot down. Why they should want to revive those ugly dances and dresses she could not imagine. The twenties for Mrs Curry had been a period of hard work, the foundations of her present success, not a time for nonsense.

  ‘Well, who says it’s time for a bit of fun and games?’ she asked. ‘What do you think, Mr Warner?’

  Mr Warner, who was already having his fun and games on the sofa, was not quite sure that any more organized recreation was necessary, but he was in a genial mood, so, ‘Whatever you say, Mrs Curry,’ he replied.

  Though Mrs Curry and the few of her guests who had also reached sixty had a natural taste for parlour games, it cannot be said that the younger members of the party were sophisticated enough to enjoy them for their period flavour. But it was not long before Use failed to guess an object in the room, and then Mr Warner found that he could claim a forfeit. After that people became more than ordinarily stupid and some of the forfeits took quite a long time. It went further than strip poker, really, and looked less ludicrous than postman’s knock.

  Ron’s failure to guess the terra cotta group of putti arose from sheer ignorance, it was not his nature to pay forfeits with good grace. Mrs Curry claimed her forfeit, however; she rather preferred coaxing unwilling horses – this evening he did not have to work very hard to play her off – Ron’s simple policy was to give as little as he could. Mrs Curry, it is true, pulled him on to her ample lap in one of the big leather chairs in the dining-room.

  ‘You great big baby,’ she said, but she contented herself with rumpling his hair and a butterfly kiss.

  ‘Good news from St Albans?’ she cooed.

  ‘Old Potter’s coming round. He’s still fishing for the bloke’s name, but I didn’t say nothing. The kid’s mum’s O. K. though. I told him what you said about the bloke wanting a little party for ’er birthday,’ Ron reported.

  ‘Such a sweet idea. But he’s such a sweet gentleman,’ said Mrs Curry.

  Ron guffawed. ‘’E give me this letter for you,’ he added.

  ‘What does it say, dear?’ asked Mrs Curry.

  ‘How should I know?’ Ron answered.

  Mrs Curry pulled the lobe of Ron’s ear rather hard. ‘Naughty boy,’ she said. Then, running her finger along his down cheekbone, ‘What did you hear about old Sands, dear?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh! I just met a young chap what knew him,’ Ron answered.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘We got talking a bit, that’s all. Nothing to it.’

  Mrs Curry’s pinch was not as playful as her smile. ‘Silly secrets,’ she said. She thought for a few moments, then she said dreamily, ‘Poor Mr Sands. It can’t be a very loving home, with his wife so sadly all the time. Oh! well, it takes all sorts of love to make the world go round.’ She looked very hard at Ron as she spoke,’ You must bring the boy to tea one day, dear.’

  ‘Who said he was a boy?’ asked Ron.

  ‘I thought you did, dear,’ replied Mrs Curry. ‘Oh well, never mind. Life’s too short to worry.’

  After ‘Forfeits’ they played ‘Sardines’, which as Mrs Curry said was ‘a nice chummy game’.

  It was getting quite late when Inspector Wragg looked at his watch. ‘Who goes home, eh, Vera?’ he said. Mrs Curry gazed athim quite surprised. She didn’t tell everything even to very old friends. ‘Why, everyone, of course, Charlie,’ she said, ‘except poor Mr Warner, who’s such a long way from home. We must make him snug here.’ As they were all leaving, she said to Use, ‘You’ll stay a moment, dear, won’t you? and help me put the room ship-shape so that it’s nice and homey for Mr Warner when he wakes up in the morning.’

  She sat up quite late going through the account books. Indeed, the lorry was collecting the early morning shift of railway workers when she went to her bedroom. She was sitting on her bed in a vast pink nylon nightgown – she had never become what she still called ‘a pyjama girl’ – and dwelling angrily on the triumphant court she could have held as mistress of the Vardon Court Hotel, when the muscles of her loose, billowing body stiffened rigidly. She knew at once what it was. She had had her great gifts too long not to take them as a matter of course, though with reverence. So often, too, these powers seemed to come to life when she thought of anything or anyone who had thwarted her wishes. This time it was so clear and immediate, ‘in the room’ as she liked to describe it, that she gave a little moan. She saw them both – Bernard Sands and his wife – and their faces had such terrible looks of misery, and, yes, you could only call it disgrace, that she had to cry out to release herself from the vision. It was gone in an instant, and, as usually happened, Mrs Curry felt quite relaxed and soothed with its passing. She snuggled into bed and slept like a comfy old top.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Family Favourites

  THERE were mornings when Ella woke as though the last ten years had never been. The shapes, the patterns, and the noises which, since the beginning of her illness, had come to absorb more and more of her working concentration were scarcely memorable. Small objects, whose irregular form suggested a defiance of the carefully proportioned world on which her safety depended, reassumed their humble role in the household scheme, demanding no longer the full force of her attention to discover and outwit the subtle dangers contained in their divergence from the categorical harmony she had erected. More spacious scenes – the view across the hills from her bedroom window, the point where the drive turned sharply to the right by the syringa bush, the last apple tree that could be seen in detail before the general blur of fruit trees became simply ‘the orchard’ – no longer opened up to her endless vistas of spaces to be pursued and compassed by the fancy and so divested of their guessed, but unknown, perils. The cawing of the rooks in the nearby copse resumed its vaguely reassuring note of routine background. She could not even recall the jarring effect of its insistence that had troubled her moments of awaking ever since her illness, nor the depressing monotony of endless boredom which its persistence suggested; less still could she hear in its rise and fall those subtle barometric indications of portentous change which, on her ‘bad days’, her ears strained to catch and her senses to interpret. So distant di
d the care-ridden, dangerous, tight-rope world of her sick life seem to her that it was impossible for Ella not to feel that this was the beginning of the famous ‘cure’, the well-known ‘recovery’ – abstractions which, after years of discussion and contemplation, had become personified as the familiar yet remote personalities in a cause célèbre followed each day in the newspapers. ‘Recovery’ and ‘cure’, perhaps, seemed all the more imminent because the danger world was not quite vanished – a disappearance which would have savoured too strongly of the miraculous – but could be sensed in the remote distance, on the point, as it seemed, of fading for ever. It would in fact have been impossible for Ella not to believe in recovery on such mornings had they not occurred so often, and so regularly faded again the next day before a renewed battery of fears and suspicions, the more alarming because she seemed by her momentary lapse in vigilance to have forgotten the complicated and detailed strategy she had devised to fight them.

  In the earlier years of her illness, when Bernard still attempted to enter her world by discussing these fears and perils at her own valuation, they had argued the possibility that these periods of happy acceptance were only further twists of her sick self, designed by their brevity the more completely to subject her to her world of illusion. But such discussions only alarmed Ella, who was never cut off from reality, for she knew that Bernard did not really accept her fears and problems at her valuation; and she was only involved in the further problem of deciding what was the real motive of his pretence, and of fighting her sick inclination to suspect that it formed part of a pattern of general hostile scheming against her.

  For Mr Clark, the psychiatrist, they might be additional evidence that her illness, never a total dissociation, was not to be regarded as psychotic, but only as an acute neurosis, strongly defiant of all forms of assistance. For her family, and in particular for Bernard, they might still be welcomed as returns to normality which by persistence and courage might be prolonged until gradually they superseded her indulgent world of fears. But for Ella, who never for a moment doubted her own basic sanity, yet knew that the struggle was not to be solved by the Sunday-school ethics of discipline and self-control, they were welcomed both for the happiness they brought to herself and her family and for the respite they gave her from the exhausting mental struggle of her usual existence. What she could never communicate to the others was the greater reality of her fight against the perils and the fears that beset her. The symbols by which they came to her – the tunnels, the caves, the icebound oceans – were, after all, incidental. The dangers were real not only for her, but for all around her. They preferred to call them threats of war, of annihilation, of death, and so, by putting them outside their control, they believed they could avoid them. Yet, by the ingenious, endless campaign she devised, she alone was coping with them. She sometimes thought that it was her selfishness that had made her cloak evil in these concrete forms of rock and ice and unfathomable water for, at least, she could face and deal with their constant changes; while to be like the others – Bernard and Sonia and Elizabeth and even Mr Clark – was to be aware of peril, sudden and totally engulfing peril, always present a little beyond the perimeter of the world which their timidity preferred to choose as the real one, and then to build their sandcastles of creation, career, and love-affairs with the cliff-top cracking and trembling above them.

  Elizabeth could tell that her mother was ‘all right’ this morning, as she heard her voice calling down the stairs in that interested, solicitous tone they had known so well before the War. To Elizabeth, who could never forgive herself for having stuck so patriotically to her job at Aircraft Production in those critical, mysterious months before Ella’s breakdown, her mother’s illness was always coincident with the War.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ Ella called, ‘you’ve grown your hair, dear.’ Elizabeth forbore to mention that for the last six weekends on which she had come down from London her hair had been this length.

  ‘Yes, darling. Do you like it?’ she asked.

  Ella walked round her daughter, considering the problem carefully. ‘Yes, dear, I think I do. I’m not sure that Daddy will. He always liked that boyish cut so much.’

  Elizabeth’s mouth set, her rather long chin seemed more than underhung. ‘Fashion, dear, waits for no man, whatever his taste. That’s the view of the mag, and what’s good enough for the mag is good enough for me.’

  ‘Don’t you find it rather tiring, dear?’ asked Ella.

  ‘Loyalty to the old mag? No, darling. You shouldn’t have sent me to the co-ed, you know, if you didn’t want an Arthur Marshall daughter. If you’d wanted the girl who slacks, who lets the side down, who crabs the Alma Mater, you should have put me down among the other girls, I’d have dished the dirt with the best of themé. But not at Wrexley, dear. It was loyalty, loyalty all the way for us, with clean minds mixed in our paths like mad. That’s why James is such an awful prig, bless him. Loyal to the Ministry, blast its guts, and loyal to the mag, that’s me. As a matter of fact I believe I thrive on it.’

  Ella thought, Bernard’s right about Elizabeth, she’s bored and she’s getting to talk like a bore. She only said rather vaguely, ‘Well, that’s all right then, dear. Are you still doing contributors’ cosmetics?’ Terms connected with women’s professions always seemed to be such ugly ones, she reflected.

  ‘Cosmetic distributors, darling,’ corrected Elizabeth. ‘No, I’m off advertising copy. I’m doing a special feature now. Just the thing for you. What the Older Woman is wearing. I did a teesy-weesy piece yesterday about France and la femme d’un certain âge. How the old bitches would as lief go out without a stitch as without their maquillage, and how no one in their senses would look at them twice whichever they did. Only I had to put that dainty bit of copy into the W.P.B. All my real masterpieces go there. Anyway, none of it would be your cup, darling.’

  ‘No,’ reflected Ella, ‘I never liked Frenchwomen. They have such mean minds. That’s not a generalization for your father, darling,’ she added, ‘he hates that sort of condemnation and he’s quite right.’

  ‘I rather hate Bernard’s broadmindedness sometimes,’ said Elizabeth in a hard voice.

  ‘Do you, darling? You’re quite wrong,’ said her mother, ‘it’s the only kind that isn’t completely false.’ It was bad enough that Elizabeth should have this deadening, smart career, but if it was going to make her embittered towards Bernard….

  Elizabeth rushed to cover her outburst. ‘One good thing, Mummy. I did the routine stores check for this article and Marshalls have got a genuine bargain in Irish tweeds. Just your little number – caked mustard and leafmould brown. No, honestly, darling, I saw exactly the thing for you. Come to London and have a slap-up lunch with me on expenses. We’ll eat ourselves sick on lobster at Prunier’s and send you back complete with facial and house-gown.’ She had so long pronounced these words in facetious Cockney that she could not now say them straight.

  ‘That sounds lovely, darling. I don’t see why not,’ said Ella. Nor could she this morning.

  Elizabeth kissed her mother. ‘You shall have two peach melbas,’ she added.

  How she does fuss, thought Ella. She must know as well as I do that I shan’t really go. Once again she reflected how lucky it was that her daughter had been kept away by war work in those first awful months of her illness. It did also occur to her that the failures in her daughter’s personality might have been less had she been urged to come to her mother at that crisis, but she dismissed the thought; for even in moments of good health she could not easily accept her illness as a factor affecting any other lives than her own.

  ‘Well,’ said Elizabeth defiantly, ‘is this the last we see of you for the week-end? Are the little pansy faces calling?’ She felt a little stab of disgust. It was her usual manner of referring to her mother’s gardening, but it had at the moment other, less acceptable connotations.

  ‘Oh no, dear,’ replied Ella, ‘I shan’t do anything in the garden today beyond what’s
absolutely necessary. I must have a long talk with Bill. It seems ages since I’ve seen him. Besides,’ she added laughing, ‘I want to find out why he’s paying this visit. Although I think I can guess. I dare say this book he wants to do about Rhodes will be very good. It’s a great pity no one will read it. He’s not a good writer, but as your father says he’s nothing like as bad as his failure makes him seem.’

  Elizabeth felt quite indignant. She and Bernard had worn themselves to shadows while Uncle Bill maundered on last night and Mummy had just abstracted herself, and now it was ‘I must talk to Bill.’ Aloud she protested, ‘But, darling, Uncle Bill sketched his ideas on Cecil Rhodes forty-four times at least last night.’

  ‘I’m sure he did, dear,’ said Ella, ‘but I never listen to people when they’re fuddled. I’ll get his tray now and he can tell me all about it before he gets up.’

  It was not really, Elizabeth decided, any broadmindedness that she detested in her parents, it was their bloody sensible censoriousness.

  There was no doubt, however, of Ella’s good health that morning. ‘The hall wants a thorough clean out, Mrs Nourse,’ she was saying to the village woman who, from her long service in doing the rough work up at the Sands’, had acquired a position of autocracy that was seldom challenged.

  ‘There’s no sense in cleaning out when the front door’s open day and night.’ Elizabeth could imagine the snap of those tight, bloodless lips.