A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Odd, she thought, how one never saw it approaching. Her hair, for instance, surely it was only that peculiar fawny colour early in the morning? She didn’t have hair like that all day? It used to be so bright. Lovely! Edwina gave her nose a searching scrutiny. Then her eyes. Her eyes, she decided, now quite lost in reflections, they were still charming. There was loyalty for you! Something at least which had stood fast in all the fading and awaying … It was an agreeable discovery. Leaning forward in her faintly-mocking appraisal, she avoided the thin, tired skin at her throat, so white, so pitifully soft, and gazed fully into the depths of her own dark vision.

  ‘Hopeless, if you ask me.’

  ‘Quentin!’ Edwina was really mortified. She would have said that something was in her eye if she were more practiced in fibs. Instead she sought to cover her embarrassment by fingering the ornament on her dress and giving brave little jabs to the puffy wings of her hair. ‘Why must you always come down in your dressing-gown?’ she scolded. ‘It really is an unpleasant habit.’

  ‘How witty we are this morning,’ Quentin replied, flicking the knotty end of a trailing rope girdle out with his feet … ‘It is a habit, although I disagree about it being unpleasant. How on earth did you guess? I bought it off a boy who is a spoilt Buchmanite.’

  ‘What is he now?’ asked Richard, pausing to shiver as he made his way to the downstairs bathroom.

  ‘He is a very private secretary.’

  ‘Hurry, Richie!’ shouted Edwina from the kitchen. She was darting to and fro with knives and plates. ‘Scrambled eggs, porridge if you can bear it, but do hurry! You know there’s no help today and Stella feels she must come home again this week-end and the Crawfords coming as well! Christmas,’ she wondered aloud, grappling with toast and slotting it home in the rack, ‘is it worth it? It’s taken me about an hour just to pick up the cards and put them down again. And awful heaps of half-eaten things.’

  ‘Did I hear you say “Crawfords”, Mum?’

  ‘Oh shut up, Quentin! There are times,’ she continued with random belligerency as she made her way to the sink, when schoolmasters’ holidays can seem most dreadfully protracted.’

  Richard left them to their affectionate war. It had been going on for years now and he knew it could never stop since it concealed some more terrible belligerency. The bathroom glittered with its frugal amenities. It wasn’t a very good bathroom but it was the wildest luxury after the gurgling horrors of Copdock. But any bathroom was a fine place where Richard was concerned. It was not that he shared Quentin’s animal lust for comfort. There was a different reason. In this warm, white cell he found he could think, which for him meant, dream. There it was, a tiled, be-towelled sanctuary in which a steamy anchorite might indulge his imagination. There was no past and no future; only a moist, warm, delicious present. The steam grew into a chiaroscuro of ideas. Words flooded up, effortless, strange, eclectic, shining. They came, but alas they went. It was hopeless trying to write words down in a bathroom. Richard had tried and you couldn’t. He shaved thoughtfully with the bath taps thundering in his ears. What was it that brought Quentin and himself home, he wondered for the hundredth time, drawing pink lanes through the soap with his razor. Or, rather, what was it that didn’t take them away? Of course there was March and Copdock, but neither he nor Quentin was really in either place. They were here, in Lafney, in ‘The Portway’, an absolutely ugly little villa hanging above the sea which had become their home after the move from the rectory. And even The Portway showed a lack of continuity in its externals only. Inside it might have been the rectory all over again. Nothing had changed. There wasn’t a chair which didn’t creak with reminders and the tables were positively expansive with anecdote. He had only to take Christmas Eve. He had been sitting on an awkward armless little chair, limp after so much Copdock and Quentin’s more discreet reminiscences of March. His mother sat opposite and Quentin read, his hands to his face and his eyes glinting methodically as they fell from line to line between parted fingers. Suddenly Richard heard it, a sound no louder than the destruction of a campion on a summer’s day. Pop! went the present.

  He was where he was, in the same chair, but the chair was in the rectory. It was Christmas and the room smelt foody and full. The chair, he remembered, gave him great discomfort. He was pressed somehow too near its rail of carved walnut roses. Quentin and the other children were jiggling round him in fierce glee. They were yelling, ‘Mrs Brand … Mummy … Dick hasn’t pulled his cracker! He hasn’t. Look, it’s here … he won’t!’ He had wanted to save it, Richard had lied. But Quentin knew why. He knew everything—always the real reason behind frightened behaviour. ‘Pull it now—now!’ he had insisted. Then Richard had screamed, a terrible noise so cut off from himself and his usual placid control that its unreality was terrifying and for a minute he found himself listening to his own temper with disdain and detachment, as though it was someone else’s. When the shame asserted itself, crawling across his flesh in a burning rash, he had tried to blot the whole room and life itself out, by throwing his body against the plump upholstery, drawing in great lungfuls of its musty breath. His tears had stained the tapestry unicorns and for consolation he had counted the tight buttons over and over again. There were ten. Until that particular moment on Christmas Eve the small grief had vanished. It had been swirled down stream like a straw of hurtful experience in the welter of time.

  This was only one reminder. There were countless others, indigenous to that life and to this. There was Richard’s childhood and the man he was now. Did Quentin feel such things? There was no sign that he did. But then Quentin was chameleon, donning colours so lavishly in his outward dissemblings that he could hide behind a brilliant panache and so be Quentin all the time. Quentin was sure of himself because he was sure of others. As for Richard, he had never been sure of anything. There lay their difference.

  The bathroom wasn’t working at all well this morning, Richard decided. It was making him morbid. He rushed through the rest of his toilet and then into breakfast. They had started. Edwina observed him covertly as he sat down. It was a habit of hers these days to allow herself a generous helping of awareness where other people were concerned. As the rector’s wife she had been too nice for too long. If she was apt to stare somewhat at times, it was only to insist that she should not be deceived. Yet she was—as indeed she was bound to be since her unworldliness was of the chronically myopic kind. At this very moment she was convinced that she saw both Richard and Quentin. But, of course, she didn’t. The two young men battling for The Times were just her ‘boys’, her adorable ungainly children. So she continued, blessedly oblivious of the reality of keeping open house for closely-related strangers.

  People, Edwina recalled, were inclined to say that Richard had a ‘nice’ face—meaning that it was open and frank and unobjectionable, and that also its unfinished look made it sufficiently identical to so many other young English faces for it not to give reason for worrying speculation. Not so Quentin. People behaved very differently in his case. His decided beauty quelled them. Neither could they ignore it, it was too factual, too apparent. It was so decidely off-(or on-) putting that it usually had the effect of a remarkable blemish. It divided his aquaintanceship into those who were extra kind and those who were extra cold. He really was terribly sweet, thought Edwina, blind to all this. But then they both were. She wouldn’t make favourites. She loved them equally. Nobody would take them for brothers, people also said. Edwina answered that she was pleased to hear it. But since she did not add her reason for such a peculiar reply, which was that she felt dreadfully sorry for the ‘alike as peas’ kind of family, so many repetitions of eyes and chins and noses merely making her flinch, the statement was generally regarded as one of her more gnomic utterances. Edwina gets vaguer and vaguer, they said.

  But there was nothing obtuse in what she wanted to say this morning. ‘I really don’t know quite how to broach this,’ she confessed, digging a server into the ham and eggs.

&nbs
p; ‘Oh, just as it comes,’ answered Quentin airily.

  ‘Not this,’ retorted Edwina, giving the food a jab. ‘You know I’m worried stiff about your future—I’m serious now,’ she insisted. ‘You also know that neither your father nor myself ever wanted to force you into any decision which was other than your own. Oh, dear!’ she said—the toast rack had slipped sideways and carefully emptied itself among the coffee things—‘Richard, it’s going to have your cup over any minute! What was I saying—? Oh, yes; the future.’

  ‘But not at breakfast, not now, at any rate’ said Quentin.

  ‘What’s wrong with now?’ demanded Edwina.

  ‘It’s so early for one thing.’

  ‘But is it? You’re twenty-five. When Dads was twenty-five …’

  ‘I’m twenty-four. I shall be twenty-five next Friday. Time is one of the quantities one should never be liberal with. There’s a man here,’ he went on in his quick clever voice which seemed to dote on irrelevance, ‘who after thirty-one years as the Secretary of Gray’s Club has taken Buddhist vows and now lives in solitude with fifteen hundred monks in Tibet.’ He rattled the paper in her direction.

  ‘Quentin, dear, do listen. If I seem to be talking particularly to you, it’s because yours is a different position from Dick’s. You had Cambridge, and, to be quite blunt, you should have gone on.’

  ‘Gone on to Ely, I suppose you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ enquired Edwina, the hint of defence in her voice, ‘isn’t that what you wanted to do?’

  ‘Yes—when I was eighteen.’

  ‘Then what stopped you?’

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ he asked.

  ‘No, no!’ retorted Edwina hurriedly. She blamed herself. She might have known that any prolonged talk with Quentin on such a subject as his future was out of the question. He grew more and more outlandish in the things that he thought he could say. It needed all her concentration at times to misinterpret them. ‘I won’t say,’ she went on, ‘that being ordained was all your father hoped for. You know he would have been the first to insist that you should be absolutely free in such a matter. But I’ve got to see you settled—both of you if it comes to that.’

  ‘I’m settled enough,’ announced Richard with deliberate irony. The extreme seediness of the Copdock appointment fell all about him like a scrofulous cloak discarded by a vindictive prophet. All this concern about whether Quentin became a parson—God help them! But what of himself?

  His swift depression was obvious.

  ‘Copdock isn’t a public school,’ said Edwina soothingly, ‘but it’s an awfully good school of its kind. I’ve heard people say it’s a very unusual school. You could say it has distinction …’ She paused, exhausted by what she liked to fancy was her debate. Peering over the glittering rim of her cup she regarded these children of hers and decided that their charm, like the grasshopper’s, could be a burden.

  ‘Winsley actually runs it,’ said Richard in a sudden desire to cover up his real discontents in front of his brother.

  ‘What does she do then?’ asked Quentin.

  ‘The Belle …?’

  ‘The Belle,’ repeated Quentin. ‘Is she, would you say …?’

  ‘You know she’s as old as the hills; she’s eighty-six.’

  Quentin shuddered.

  ‘She’s awfully nice. Witty too. She knew Maria Montessori. I like her,’ he added. Having made a stand for Copdock he felt it was his duty to exploit it.

  ‘Of course you do,’ said Quentin evenly, splurging a golden hill of marmalade into his toast, ‘But then you’re so ‘nice’ yourself. You’re as generous as a hamper. Something for everybody.’

  There was a suggestion of a storm. It drifted across to Edwina who had given up her argument to read her letters. She hoped that they weren’t going to quarrel. But the oleaginous kindliness of the season was having its effect so far as Quentin was concerned. He wanted to break out. She could tell it by the frigid poise of his head, a stance he had carried forward from childhood.

  ‘There was a man at Trinity rather like you,’ Quentin was saying. ‘His name was Munsen-Orle, no actual friend, but a near acquaintance. He was so damned—sorry, Mummy—polite for one thing. He just couldn’t refuse an invitation, however boring. He was jolly nice to old ladies. “I can’t manage Tuesday,’ he once said to me, “It’s my night for visiting Mrs Teeming—she used to be the postmistress of Royston, you know.” But it might equally well be a duchess. And once he introduced me to a dear little man in King’s Parade. “I expect you know Mr Herbert Wells,” he said. That was fine, but the very next day he insisted that I accompany him to the Dorothy Café to have tea with a posse of hikers all set for determining the Hog’s Back. A pomander, you might call him, with relationships sticking out in so many directions that they made it quite impossible to get near to the heart of Munsen-Orle himself….’

  He’s away, thought Richard, a backwards journey to all those spirited Cambridge evenings. Would he always talk like that? It was all right now, but later the words would rattle like pebbles in a can. ‘It’s because you only believe in a tight, right little circle,’ he accused. Yet it wasn’t true and he knew it. To do that meant that you were scared, and Quentin, when it came to it, had the most alarming courage.

  ‘N-n-no …’ answered Quentin consideringly. ‘All I want to know—and I really want to know—is why you have to go about with all those dreary people that we hear off. Why sit in pubs making up to the bores, why, if I may say so, foster relationships with those you are in fundamental enmity with? I only want to know …’

  ‘Fundamental what …?’ asked Edwina, surfacing from the post. Her letters were too equable to have such words as ‘fundamental’ anything lumbering through them. She stuffed the one she was reading back into its envelope.

  ‘He means Bateson, I suppose,’ said Richard.

  Quentin did not answer.

  ‘Oh!’ said Edwina in a suddenly disinterested voice. The conversation assumed an immediate pointlessness where she was concerned. It was just the children arguing. She began to clear away. ‘Anyway,’ she added, ‘what could Quenny know of Mr Bateson?’

  ‘Lots,’ said Quentin. ‘Haven’t I had him for every meal—Tom Bateson, the jolly old coach, all beer and bonhomie!’

  ‘So it’s how does Bateson fit in with my conception of poetry and life. Well, if you must know, this type fits in very well.’

  ‘Concessionally speaking, of course,’ said Quentin with lively mockery.

  It was here at this point that Richard should have begun to lose his temper. But he didn’t. It was becoming one of those things which needed an effort to bring them off. ‘What about your own friends?’ he retorted, knowing that here he was at a great advantage. Quentin’s friends were the shadows of shadows: myriad, but unsubstantial. They must be since nobody had seen them. They wrote prolifically. Quentin’s forwarded post was a revelation and a wonder to the Lafney post-office staff. But he let little of what they wrote out into the common air. Occasionally a bold name would tumble from his talk with a regrettable jingle, like a penny speeding up the aisle. They got from him only the smallest of small change.

  ‘What happened to that nice boy who came here just after you both took Schools?’ enquired Edwina.

  ‘Marston,’ said Quentin. ‘Africa—Colonial Service.’

  ‘Does he like it?’

  ‘I’ve no idea—I suppose so.’

  ‘But didn’t he want to paint? … I seem to remember him saying so.’

  ‘Well, he can paint in Africa—jolly good place to paint.’

  ‘Do you hear from him? That’s all I wondered,’ persisted Edwina. ‘Oh, look here,’ she added in the swift fluster that so easily overtook her, ‘it’s ten—or nearly!’ She whisked the mats together and so discovered Sir Paul’s letter. For a moment she was certain it was one of those cream embossed envelopes bought over the counter. Friends frequently wrote to her from hotels and post-offices in an excess of remembrance fol
lowing some little jaunt. Her glasses had hid themselves. Holding the letter close to her nose, she made out the accomplished hand. ‘Richard,’ she said, almost reluctantly, ‘it’s for you.’

  It was a brief letter, polite, concise and unambiguous, but he read through it twice before answering Quentin’s unspoken question.

  ‘It’s from Sir Paul Abbott.’

  ‘He has some punctuation difficulty, perhaps?’ Quentin’s mockery, however, was for once bereft of his driving energy. He pushed away from the breakfast table and stood up, tall and most deliberately casual. The cigarette bouncing on the lid of his silver case jumped like a nerve. He seemed to be groping for something, a word, a reason. ‘How—why?’ he asked outright, because if what Richard was saying was true, it was so extraordinary.

  ‘Well, read it.’ Richard flicked the stone-grey page across the table.

  ‘“Brown’s Hotel,”’ read Quentin out loud—‘The handwriting! Like the Recording Angel’s! “Dear Mr Brand, I am writing at once to thank you for listening so sympathetically to the proposition I put to my aunt Miss Bellingham just before Christmas. The task won’t be wearisome—or I trust that it won’t—only a matter of getting things back into their proper places, books and papers which cannot be left to any ordinary help. But I’ll say no more in this note than to beg you to come to Sheldon and see for yourself. I leave this hotel on Tuesday next. Would the following Tuesday suit you? Please come to dinner then. Sheldon is four miles from Copdock, not at all as the crow flies, but you will find it, no doubt. Take the St Edmundsbury Road.