by Angus Wilson
But here, unfortunately, Eric began to giggle helplessly until tears ran down his cheeks. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid you ought to have met me some years ago before I knew Bernard Sands. You see he used to do an imitation of that particular approach which was so terribly like all you’ve been saying.’
After that there was nothing to do but leave, but when Eric got home, he felt suddenly as though Bernard’s death had not left him completely alone. He even felt sure enough of himself to write to Mimi. If she would like it, he said, he would come home for the week-end. Everything was going very well in London, he emphasized, but he would like to see her and put an end to this foolish quarrel.
*
It had taken Terence some days to get used to living the desultory, malicious, and calculating existence that Sherman’s ménage demanded beneath the excessive ecstasy of saints’ eyes and the writhing sensuality of martyrs’ limbs. But the manieristi held the day and whatever held the day took first place in Sherman’s house. Nevertheless, though there were moments when Terence longed to hang up a reproduction of a Cézanne apple, little though such an object would have been to his taste, the first weeks went smoothly enough. The important guests, it is true, tended to treat him rather as a new appendage to Sherman’s furniture, and Sherman himself carefully underlined the golden-cage aspect of the relationship, but Terence felt that patience and tenacity would have their reward. It was quite suddenly that his resolve broke down. The incident arose, to his surprise, over Evelyn Ramage. He had already realized that Evelyn was among the many aspects of his life over which Sherman would demand revision; he had decided, in fact, on a compromise by which he would continue to visit her, but would resist her attempts to visit him in his new splendour. It was not a pretty compromise, and he realized that his fear of Evelyn’s suffering at Sherman’s hands if she came to Hill Street was only an attempt to palliate one more unpleasant decision into which his life had led him. What he had not expected was that Sherman would himself ask Evelyn to dinner. She came, she saw, and she was genuinely enchanted. What was more,, Sherman made full use of her enchantment. He dangled every hope before her eyes; he suggested that her return to prosperity and café society would be his especial care; he asked her advice and her help for Terence – after all she has been a mother to him in his time of need and Sherman could never forget that; he appealed to her good-scout sympathy for his own loneliness – if she had thought him hard and cruel, he would like to tell her something of his early years, of the way life had thrown him up; he even encouraged her to patronize him. Terence, by every desperate effort he made to warn her, only succeeded in appearing ungrateful. Before the evening was over she was snubbing him and moralizing on the slender basis of his foothold in Sherman’s house.
Sherman was in quite a purring mood when she had gone. ‘Poor old dear,’ he said, ‘you did give her the works, but if we’re going to her house, we’ve got to ask her back, you know.’
‘You,’ said Terence, ‘don’t have to go near her house. You only came there to keep an eye on me anyway, as you damned well know.’
‘Yes, dear, that’s what I said,’ Sherman laughed. ‘Poor old Evelyn! How she did enjoy a good square meal. I think she likes me, dear, you know. She promised to keep an eye on you for me and it promises to be quite a jealous little eye. Of course, if you feel you want to leave the seamy past behind, we can always cut such cables. I don’t know which I shall enjoy more, manoeuvring them or cutting them. It sounds quite nautical either way, and a sailor’s life is my favourite thing.’
Evelyn, it seemed, was to be on Sherman’s side or go. Terence told himself firmly that he would not give her up. It was only quite suddenly in the night, in the darkness that hid the luxury of his Louis Seize bedroom, that he counted through all his friends – the only safety that he possessed outside the rocky ocean of his new chosen life – and realized that those who did not drop him would become Sherman’s friends. He cursed Bernard for dying on him. He even regretted Elizabeth’s cosiness. But by the morning he remembered only Bernard’s warnings, and, after a row that nearly broke the glass bathroom with shouts and flying bottles, he left to take up his complicated fight alone once more.
*
The first two months in prison Mrs Curry found very trying. It was not at all a loving, and certainly not a cosy, world. She found herself more and more possessed by psychic visions in which wardresses and judges and Ella Sands and Ron underwent the most appalling misfortunes. But after a while her sunny nature reasserted itself. Her beautiful thoughts got over to the chaplain and through him to the governor, and through her to many of the wardresses. Her huge bulk and advancing years fitted her only for such light duties as bookbinding and the prison organ. Soon, too, her loving and enterprising nature made her the centre of quite a group of young girls among the inmates, and when, after two years, she was released as a result of her good behaviour, she had really formed a most useful group of loving, dutiful girls through whom she could bring snugness and cosiness to respectably lonely gentlemen.
*
Ron, too, though he much disliked the hard work of prison life, found in so monastic a community that success with the ‘old one two’ which had been so consistently frustrated in the course of this story.
*
It was one afternoon in late August, when Ella was sitting among the half-packed suitcases which signalled her departure for a holiday abroad with Elizabeth that she received her first visit from one of the new literary residents of Vardon Hall. She was pleased to see young Mr Greenlees for she had heard so much of Lim from Bernard.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘how are you running yourselves?’
‘It’s all going very well really,’ Mr Greenlees told her. ‘The builders have, thank God! at last vanished. To that extent the new axe has brought us peace.’
‘New axe?’ Ella asked. ‘What new axe?’
‘There’s been a need for economy apparently,’ said Mr Greenlees. ‘The committee were most reluctant, as usual in these cases –’ He spoke with a bitter twinkle of the eye.
‘But the money was all arranged,’ Ella cried.
‘Not, it would seem, with sufficient prudence,’ Mr Greenlees replied. ‘I regret only the chef. The new cook has had only too telling experience of institutional cookery.’
‘My God,’ cried Ella, ‘how the hell has Charles Murley let all this happen?’
Mr Greenlees looked quite surprised. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘Murley was one of the movers of the economy. It’s true, you know, that we must step carefully at first. Bernard had done wonders, but the cost of living, you know, does rise so. They’ve got a very good man though to manage the estate. It saves the cumbrous machinery of frequent committees.’
‘What man?’ Ella cried.
‘Well, I’ve only seen him once. He used to be a publisher and then he ran some government-sponsored scheme for information exchange. He’s quite young and very pushing. He’s already decided on a summer programme to attract foreign visitors.’
‘Foreign visitors?’ Ella’s face was purple.
‘We shall all contribute,’ said Mr Greenlees. ‘Sir Joseph felt it was the most satisfactory way of giving us contacts with foreign publishers.’
‘And what did you say? The writers, I mean? Did you have any chance to put forward your views?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Mr Greenlees, ‘we have an elected member on the committee. Murley insisted on it; he pointed out how Bernard would have wished it.’
Ella looked at him closely; she was unable to tell if he was being ironical. At last she said, ‘And you’re all quite satisfied?’
‘Oh yes, I think so,’ said Mr Greenlees. ‘It’s so difficult to know how any new enterprise is going to turn out, isn’t it? Bernard, you see, would have known how to let it grow, but without …’
*
It was when they were on the aeroplane to Nice that Ella made her attitude clear to Elizabeth.
‘I’ve go
t a mass of introductions,’ she said. ‘There should be people to visit almost everywhere.’
‘I’m coming to be with you, darling,’ Elizabeth said, ‘not to visit people.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Ella, ‘and I’m very happy, dear. But I want to be on my own sometimes and I want you to meet new people.’ She sighed. It seemed so conventional and trite an answer to her daughter’s unhappiness, which she so longed to ease; but she had not got very far with her earlier, less conventional advice.
Later, when the little trays of luncheon had been laid before them, Elizabeth suddenly said, ‘I’ve been reading The Player Queen again. It’s even better than I remembered.’ She had decided that to talk of Bernard to Ella was the right thing to do. ‘It seems strange that his books will have such influence when in his life he got so little done. I suppose it’s because you were always the doer.’
‘My dear,’ Ella replied, ‘doing doesn’t last, even if one knows what one’s doing, which one usually doesn’t. But Bernard was something to people – lots of people – me, for example – and that has its effect in the end, I think.’ She turned away to the window. It was really easier to concentrate on the clouds moving above and below like great golden snowdrifts.
Thorley, 1951
About the Author
Sir Angus Wilson (1913–91), one of Britain’s most distinguished novelists, was educated at Westminster and Merton College, Oxford. He joined the British Museum as a cataloguer before being called for service in 1941. His literary career began with a collection of short stories published in 1949. These were followed by other short-story collections, novels and plays.
Co-founder with Malcolm Bradbury of the MA programme in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, Wilson was appointed professor in 1967. He was chair of many literary panels, including the Booker Prize, and was a campaigner for homosexual equality. He was knighted in 1980.
Copyright
This ebook edition first published in 2012
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© Angus Wilson, 1952
The right of Angus Wilson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–28764–2
