by Alan Clark
Alan Clark
Summer Season
AN ENTERTAINMENT
Contents
1 Gevaert
2 Kitty
3 Riddle-Brede and Others
4 More of Gevaert
5 The Reverend Pick
6 Mrs. Roydon
7 Ponsonby
8 Cumber
9 Canon Brooke
10 More of Mrs. Roydon
11 Sergeant Chambers
12 Under Suspicion
13 An Afternoon on the Water
14 Desperate Measures
15 Two Nasty Moments
16 More of Sergeant Chambers
17 I Raise a Fire
A Note on the Author
1 * Gevaert
‘Oh,’ said Mrs. Roydon, surveying me with a gaze from which interest and amiability were alike absent, ‘so you’re the tutor.’ She made no effort to withdraw from the porch, which she was obstructing, and so I remained on the doorstep, only half able to form the smile of co-operative deference that I had been rehearsing on the journey down. As I felt my features relapse, I bent and picked up my two suitcases.
At that time, of course, I did not know that she was Mrs. Roydon and had taken her to be Mrs. Gevaert, my prospective employer. She was a tall, discontented-looking woman with silver-blue hair, expensively set. She could not have been much older than forty-five, but her white, powdery make-up was clearly laid out for a ‘delicate’ effect—one that was not in harmony with the determined set of her mouth and jaw. These minor observations occurred to me as, straightening up, with the two suitcases weighing down my shoulders like a Calabrian water-carrier’s, and conscious of the fact that my jacket collar had ‘risen’ alarmingly, I attempted to rephrase both the smile and some accompanying banality.
As my mouth opened, ‘Who’s that, Fleur?’ came a voice from beyond the other side of the hall.
‘The tutor,’ said Mrs. Roydon and stood to one side, flattening herself against the wall in a manner that cannot have been comfortable, although as a posture it was not ineffective.
‘Of course, Mr. Crane, how nice.’ Mrs. Gevaert emerged from the gloom of the hall, both hands extended and smiling freely. ‘In very good time. Do come in. I’m afraid poor little Paul is in bed today, a gastric upset. These cold winds, you know. He was so looking forward to seeing you, but, still, I will show you your room. I’m afraid that there’s no one to carry your bags. That’s just the way things are these days, isn’t it?’
Although not entirely convincing, her fluent manner was in pleasant contrast to that of Mrs. Roydon. With one of those quick glints of truth which, I was later to discover, occurred fairly frequently in the artificial texture of her conversation she said, ‘I expect you’ll find that you’re the butler here, as well as everything else, for the next few weeks.’ As I clumped up the stairs behind her, a medley of smells—fish, laundry, floor-polish—seemed ominously to confirm the absence of any resident domestic help.
After she had left me I brooded on my situation. I had a small, boxlike room at the back of the house. Outside, a narrow stretch of lawn lay neatly clipped. Across the lawn from my window were the ends of other people’s gardens, separated by mellow brick walls of great age, and still farther, about two hundred yards, emerging from the foliage of many small trees, other people’s roofs. It was a pleasing prospect, of a peaceful, donnish kind, and I felt that if I could manage a certain firmness on points connected with the more menial and less closely defined duties of a ‘tutor’ my period of office could be tolerable and even productive. Not that production was my strong point. My black notebook, containing those few essays and critical pieces—the majority of them unpublished—that I had managed to complete in the four years that had elapsed since I finished my National Service, felt even lighter and more insubstantial than usual, as taking it from my suitcase I placed it reverently on the small bedside table that would have to serve as a desk.
I could hear movement below, callings, intermittent shouted exchanges, but decided that etiquette in these circumstances was for me to remain unseen for about half an hour, and started unpacking. As I pottered about my room that enjoyed the late evening sunshine still with some warmth in this, the second week of August, I reflected on the spring and early summer of this year. These had been particularly troublesome periods for me. A succession of temporary teaching jobs at marginal preparatory schools had petered out after Christmas, Gabbitas Thring notwithstanding, and, almost literally penniless, I had been compelled to resort to the hospitality of my parents. They, while avoiding direct insult, had none the less employed a variety of media for communicating their resentment at my presence and disapproval of my evident sloth. My father, who had a habit of passing the fingers of a cupped hand across his brow when distressed, would make this gesture each morning when seeing me for the first time and say: ‘Ah, my dear boy, are you still here? Ah well, how nice to see you.’ A sentence which, though innocent enough when taken out of its context, came gradually to arouse in me an exquisite pain. Furthermore, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I soon came to experience the sensation whenever I witnessed the gesture—as when it was prompted by trivial domestic crises for which I was not directly to blame.
In search of a possible post I would scrutinize the ‘personal’ columns of The Times daily and, weekly, those of the New Statesman—but this itself was a practice which irritated my parents as it would happen that these journals were frequently missing at moments when they wished to read them, notably, in the case of The Times, after breakfast.
One of the primary characteristics that emerges from a detailed analysis of the ‘personal’ columns of The Times is its sameness. Every day, among the people who are trying to get £500 more for their Surrey cottage or Bentley than even the most shameless house or car dealer would charge, there are two or three male advertisers with impeccable backgrounds offering to take any position, for any wage, and with the respect of any task, ‘provided interesting’. In competition with these figures I had felt at a disadvantage. Three rejections had left me despondent; and I was surprised and delighted to have been accepted by Mrs. Gevaert, who had advertised for ‘Common entrance tutor for charming young boy, about 12, in delightful house, old Westerlea, September, 2 gns. weekly and board’. It was not until trudging up the hill from the railway station with my two cases that I came to reflect on how absurdly small was the wage I was to receive. Perhaps the reason for my being so promptly accepted was that no one else had replied to Mrs. Gevaert’s advertisement?
None the less, I could ill afford a last-minute rejection, or even a cutting short of my period of office; hence the anxious smile which, though it had failed so signally on Mrs. Roydon, I was still prepared to exhibit on any appropriate occasion that might arise.
This might be one of them now, I felt, as, framing the smile, I said ‘Come in’ in response to a powerful masculine knock on my door.
The man who entered was short and broad. He had black hair, rather disconcertingly en brosse, and was wearing grey flannel trousers with a red woollen shirt, open at the neck, whose collar he carried outside the lapels of a dark tweed jacket. A suggestion of beard sprouted from his chin.
‘I’m Gevaert,’ he said and stuck out a wide, thick hand.
‘How do you do, sir,’ I replied, taking it.
‘You’ve got a nice room.’ He walked round sniffing, like a dog. The Central European accent was just perceptible, chiefly apparent, as was to be expected, in his pronunciation of Rs and Vs. The word which seemed to give him most difficulty was, rather unfortunately, ‘wife’. ‘My vieve told me that you were here. I thought I’d come up and see you at once, for we must arrange Paul’s syllabus without loss of time.’ He approached closely, a mannerism which, I soon came
to discover, indicated unease at some impending minor falsehood, and continued, ‘You’re being paid a good wage.’
Taking the view that any answer to this should be oblique, I said, ‘When does Paul take his exams?’
‘That depends on you, my friend.’ Gevaert patted me on the shoulder firmly, but without any cordiality whatsoever. ‘I am anxious for him to take them as soon as possible, naturally. He has not been well educated up to now. My vieve and I decided that it would be better to send him to a good public school and, for his primary education, see that he had good individual attention in the holidays.’ He emphasized all these last words very deliberately.
‘Yes, I think that’s an excellent idea,’ I said. ‘I wish——’ I was about to say that I wished that my parents had done the same for me, but he interrupted me. I was soon to discover that Gevaert was never interested in what ‘inferiors’ had to say.
‘We are not rich people.’ (I could not help reflecting on the frequency with which words containing Rs occur to people who have difficulty in pronouncing them.) ‘We are not rich, but we are happy to make these sacrifices for our little Paul. Of course, I myself used to be very wealthy; before the war my family controlled the leather trade in Bruges. But now, thanks to my brain, I have managed to acquire these few small possessions …’
‘You certainly have a delightful house, Mr. Gevaert.’
‘Delightful, ha. This is a town of “delightful” houses. An estate-agent’s paradise, occupied by rentiers living on their declining rents.’ There was a pause. Then: ‘Are you a Marxist?’ he asked me sharply.
This was a difficult question, for a variety of reasons, and required a longish answer, to which, plainly, Gevaert was in no mood to listen; for, approaching me closely again, he said, ‘I was secretary of the Bruges Socialist Party in 1932.’
‘There can’t be many Socialists in Westerlea,’ I offered.
‘Gah, there’s no intellectual life here of any sort. A few pretenders, eh? Ha ha, there’s a chess club, of course.’
‘Oh, good, I enjoy a game,’ I said, then added hurriedly: ‘I’m quite useless, though, I’m afraid,’ remembering a train journey during the summer when I had been elegantly sliced into shreds by a strange Indian sitting opposite me.
‘But what is this, my friend?’ said Gevaert. ‘We anticipate. First let us speak of your duties. It is not going to be all jam, you know.’
‘I don’t expect it to be,’ I answered, airily wary.
‘I want you to take the greatest pains with little Paul’s syllabus. You must go over everything yourself first, and also, of course, correct his papers in your own time. I want to be kept in constant touch with his progress myself, also. Then again, you must remember that you are a man in a house among women. You must be prepared to lend a hand if need be.’
I didn’t follow that last sentence very fully, but what I did understand I didn’t like. ‘When would it be convenient for me—for you—to show me his textbooks and things, Mr. Gevaert?’ I asked.
‘When you are ready, my friend, when you are ready. Don’t rush yourself.’
‘Max,’ came a call from below. ‘Max, Max.’
‘This is my veive calling,’ said Gevaert, and went out, slamming the door.
After he had left me I sat down and thumbed through, but did not read, a copy of Norman Hartnell’s Silver and Gold which was lying on the chest of drawers. I could feel the onset, or preliminary symptoms, of a vague nervousness or sense of angst which had been attacking me a good deal that summer. It is founded, I believe, on an acute feeling or sudden realization of insecurity. Small things can set it in motion and unless quickly checked by some physical or intellectual diversion it snowballs nightmarishly.
Though without any marked physical disability, except severe short sight (I am too vain to wear spectacles except in the darkness of the cinema or—rare occasion—when driving a borrowed car), I am a serious hypochondriac much given to self-analysis. I had not, however, been able to isolate the particular category of experience which gave rise to these attacks, and was thus very much at their mercy. Gevaert had seemed vaguely hostile, coldly impersonal at any rate. Yet with a mere subsistence wage I was in no position to defy him. ‘Lend a hand,’ he’d said. What on earth could he mean by that? These thoughts tumbled round in my head and I could feel the sense of disquiet growing rapidly. I slammed down Silver and Gold and rose to my feet.
There was a small hand-basin in my room and I ran off some cold water and drank it, although the tumbler that had been provided was not very clean. It might be better, I thought, to go down straight away and get some idea of the scope of my work, the ‘syllabus’ and so on. Also I was feeling peckish and would have welcomed a cup of tea, or a sandwich, or what. Mrs. Gevaert was, from what I could make out, an upper-class woman and would, if she ran the household her way, have ‘dinner’ at around a quarter to eight. On the other hand, it was, in the non-U sense, ‘tea’ time, being twenty past six, and if such a meal was in the offing I was prepared to join in. I had not yet made up my mind which role to adopt: That of an exceptionally well-mannered guest in a third-rate country house? Or of a discreet, high-echelon domestic servant? It might be easier if I knew what Gevaert was. He did not hold down a regular job, that much I could tell from those ‘informal’ clothes worn in the late afternoon of a weekday. Yet a Financial Times had been pinkly peeping out from among the papers on the hall table. Had he got a good deal out of Bruges in the thirties? Or was he ‘looking after’ his wife’s investments?
I opened my door and stepped out on to the landing. Mrs. Roydon was coming slowly up the stairs, holding her head high in the manner of one who, although righteous, has lately been worsted in an engagement. I was thus immediately faced by a problem intimately bound up with questions of status—namely, etiquette on stairs.
I had dim memories, from my early youth, of domestics waiting on landings for one to complete one’s ascent—the stairs were in fact wide enough for two people to pass without inconvenience—but was I now guest or servant? Desperately anxious to create a good impression, I faltered and tried to catch her eye, without success. When she was right up to the last step she suddenly seemed to notice me and gave a theatrical start, with a sort of yelping intake of breath, and almost, though not quite, covering her breasts with an involuntary movement of her arms; then, recovering, she looked at me as if I had made an impertinent suggestion and swept past.
This encounter certainly did nothing to soothe my nerves, and I jogged hastily down the stairs and into the hall, anxious to mingle and, if possible, to eat.
2 * Kitty
I hadn’t associated Gevaert with sherry, somehow, but there was the Dry Fly bottle squarely squatting on a rather inappropriate brass salver, and I was already well into my second of the quite generous (though ugly) glasses.
‘We dine at seven-forty-five,’ he said. ‘Don’t change, of course.’ I got the impression that he really almost wished we did change, in spite of that red flannel shirt. ‘But I hope you’ve brought a black tie, as from time to time we give little parties. There will be a few people coming round on Sunday, for example. Leive in the provinces, eh?’
I drained my glass. Things didn’t seem so unpromising, after all. ‘Very nice,’ I said, then caught his eye; he seemed a trifle indignant over something—too rapid drinking on my part perhaps. ‘Oh, yes, of course I’ve brought a black tie. Rather.’
‘While you’re here I’ll give you an idea of the layout of the house. Now, to start with, this room we’re in now is my study.’ He waved at a suspiciously tidy desk on which there were two olive-green ‘In’ and ‘Out’ trays. At the desk stood a large, comfortable, Great Exhibition upright chair on which reposed one of those inflatable rubber cushions looking like a small lifebelt, which people have to sit on when they are suffering from piles.
He walked over and pushed the chair in so that the cushion was invisible. ‘I don’t like being disturbed here when I am working in the morni
ngs; least of all’—he returned to the same emphatic style of delivery in which, earlier, he had explained the background to Paul’s education—‘least of all do I like any meddling with my private papers.’ After a pause to let this rather improbable warning sink in he walked over to the french windows and continued. ‘Then here we have the garden. I like to open these french windows in the afternoon and stroll out on to the lawn.’
On the wall by the window was a rather fine barometer which, in a flash of intuitive reasoning, I deduced to have been inherited from his wife’s side of the family. Turning inwards again, he tapped this and said, ‘No sign of an end to the fine weather, eh?’
‘Gorgeous,’ I said, ‘isn’t it?’
He flashed me another quick look in which surprise and contempt were nicely synthesized. ‘Now for the rest of the house. Follow me.’
I followed, fuming slightly at the way Gevaert, for all his egomania, in spite of or because of his preposterous complacency, manœuvred one or soothed one or whatever it was into lowering one’s guard, and then very quickly rounded with a quick deft blow.
‘This is the lounge,’ he was saying.
We were standing in a long, rather poorly lit room, with a low ceiling, that faced out on to the street. The assortment of furniture was varied, but, in the main, comfortable and not without taste. Only the rugs seemed rather shabby, the more so in contrast with the fine polish of the wooden parquet floor. ‘You understand,’ Gevaert was saying, ‘this room and the dining-room here,’ he led me out again, and across the hall, ‘they were the principal rooms of the house when it was built, in 1824, that was, and my study, that’s the old kitchen. Then much later the present kitchen wing was built on, giving a bathroom and spare room on each of the two floors above, as you will see. At the same time the old kitchen was made into another reception room.’ As he said ‘reception room’ he spat, as well as mispronouncing it.
