A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Now another landscape spread itself before him. Or perhaps, a gardenscape. At any rate he didn’t have to brave mountains or swim seas to get to it. He wouldn’t even have to cope with a new language because presumably they would use the words of a lifetime. There it was, screened only by the flimsiest trellis, the unfamiliar wastes of love. If he withdrew a little at first, it was because of the shock of discovering the object of desire where he had least expected it to be. ‘Let’s walk along to the Martello …’ he would have suggested, except that was too much like going over old ground. There were few walks in Lafney worth the taking. The town was all on a line with the shingle reach and the wind knifed along it, all the winter and early spring, slicing up talk and well-being.

  ‘The dyke, then …?’ he suggested, as if they had both of them considered and rejected the other proposal.

  ‘The dyke?’ asked Mrs Crawford. ‘It hasn’t broken again, has it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ answered Mary. ‘We’re going for a walk. Nobody minds, do they?’

  ‘You know it has nothing to do with me, what you do or where you go,’ Mrs Crawford retorted. The reality of the occasion quite failed her. It was after luncheon and the children were going out and the grown-ups were staying at home. That had happened often enough in the past, God knew! If there were many more days like this she thought she might go mad. Perhaps it was time she organised something—A.R.P., nursing … evacuees. But how—in Lafney? It was so tight, so complacent; a nincompoop could organise the whole place to the hilt in a jiffy.

  Only Mr Yockery suspected the broad truth of their departure, and that in a purely habitual way. His age and his prolonged isolation from affection made him follow desire in others like a star. He had an oldmaidish zest for matchmaking.

  ‘If I don’t happen to see you again, Richard, you’ll remember me to Winsley, won’t you.’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘Oh, you were about to tell us, Father,’ cried Mrs Crawford, swivelling round in her chair with sudden interest. ‘You were saying earlier on—oh, what was it we were discussing before Hibble came in—do you remember, Mary?’

  ‘I don’t think I do. Was it about Richard’s going to see Sir Paul at Sheldon …’ She realized the magnitude of her mistake as soon as she had made it. She looked at Richard, her mouth parted with unsaid apology.

  ‘Yes, of course!’ declared Mrs Crawford. ‘Sheldon! I knew there were hundreds of things we should be discussing—And now everybody’s going out. What a pity!’

  Richard made an attempt to strangle any further talk by pushing back his chair, but it moved silently on the thick carpet and Mr Yockery, dragged back from his own ungovernable little thoughts, echoed, ‘Going to Sheldon …?’ It was surprising how the reiteration of the word by so many nosey tongues had debased it. Sheldon had seemed the most charming name for a house in Miss Bellingham’s room. Now it hummed with innuendo. Unsuccessful with his scraping chair, Richard held out his father’s heavy silver case, hoping that that might stem further questions. Mrs Crawford accepted a Gold Flake and smoked it in her ugly, inexpert manner—the way women may have smoked in the beginning, holding it with too many fingers and exhibiting a garish clot of rings.

  ‘Yes, I heard that Sir Paul was on his way home,’ said Mr Yockery. He turned his pale narrow head in the direction of Mrs Crawford in a self-conscious effort to give an absolutely unequivocal impression. ‘I’m a great fan of his,’ he added. ‘I think I must possess everything he’s ever written.’

  ‘Including The Solitary Height?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Including that rare masterpiece indeed,’ replied Mr Yockery sententiously.

  The situation was saved—or restored. A wavering harmony though nothing to boast of, returned. So did Hibble, cross and unrung-for, but with that unerring clairvoyance which told her ‘they were done’.

  ‘I’ll just get my warm coat,’ said Mary in a slightly confused voice.

  ‘You’ll come back and have some tea, won’t you?’ insisted Mrs Crawford in her loud insincere hostessy way.

  ‘In that case I won’t say good-bye,’ nodded Mr Yockery, pleased with the prospect of an extension of the occasion. There were fifty hours in every one of his days. He took his place at Mrs Crawford’s side and became lost at once in that particular fantasy. What security he found in doing so! Even she was gratefully pleased with the care with which he conducted her from the room.

  6

  THE car was Mary’s idea—an immediate one, although she toyed a little with other suggestions just for the look of the thing. Because she had put off telling her mother that they intended to take it—a slight weariness at having to explain her flimsiest actions year in and year out had produced its own little pall of dishonesty (she found actual lying forced up an almost physical nausea inside her, so she now shied away from that and relied entirely on silence with its mixed bag of answers), they eased the vehicle from the gig-house with an apprehensive casualness. It was an Alvis. It had a fine, bright dashboard and high, cold, slippery seats. Through the clean lunette made by the windscreen wiper on his side, Richard took in the intricately stacked lumber which lined the place. Beginning with trunks, too immense ever to have gone anywhere, it mounted with a sad profligacy of colourless basket furniture, damp books and bursting saddles. Like a grotesque cornucopia spilling out the essence of its decade, a large gentian-shaped gramophone horn swung forlornly from a rafter. Over everything—even competing with the chilly leather and petrol reek of the Alvis—there lingered still the sweet ineradicable hint of horses.

  She backed the car gingerly.

  ‘It needs a jolly good clear out,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she answered limply. There was barely room to put a matchstick between the front wing and the chest faintly inscribed ‘Commander R. St. J. Crawford, R.N.’ She got out and closed the door herself, a bit resentful over his criticism of something for which she had a fondness. Of course it needed a clear out. Wasn’t one absolutely surrounded by this haphazard loot from the past, things that nudged and reminded one all the time? Of course it should be tidied away, outlawed from sight and memory. Yet it never would, because the result would not be order, but a void. Her own life had so far been too quiet for her to feel that she could take a broom to her experiences and start afresh. They were all too frugal, too cherished. She hoped that the mere fact of her loving him would not lead him to believe that all she had gone through, trivial though it might seem, was nothing. The vein of richness, the novelty even, in the new situation was wonderfully exciting to her, but for it to be anything other than just that, she must be sure that he liked what he actually saw, and not what his conceit or his imagination envisaged. She locked the garage door. How complete I am when it comes to being truly underhanded, she thought. From the corner of her eye she saw Richard lolling in his seat with the door wide open, looking a bit quelled and embarrassed that she should be doing everything. She climbed in and the car swung a little on its springs in the way she used to find so luxuriously thrilling as a child.

  ‘I was looking at all the thingummies,’ he said, fingering the dashboard; ‘how beautifully they’re made.’

  ‘You’ve seen it all hundreds of times before.’

  ‘Thousands, if you like,’ he retorted a little sharply, reacting to the vague irritation in her voice, ‘but does that prevent me seeing it in a quite new way at this moment?’

  She smiled, catching at the retreating choke inexpertly. She enjoyed his being faintly put out. His good manners—extreme politeness is, after all, but one aspect of cowardice—could be exasperating.

  ‘You mean that we didn’t even think of it as an Alvis before?’ She scrubbed against her window with an old piece of yellow rag.

  ‘Oh no. It was something far more interesting.’

  ‘Like an early morning start to a holiday? Or a picnic?’

  ‘Dunwich!’ he said triumphantly. Dunwich had always been the outing par excellence. The Alvis, crammed with the Rectory ch
ildren; Mr Brand, with his fearfully tired merriment; Edwina, too nicely hatted and gloved; Mary, a big, self-conscious summery girl in her teens and in front, Mrs Crawford herself driving with meticulous style and with an aplomb more suitable to reins than to gears; would descend on the little place with something like a whoop. ‘Couldn’t we go there now?’

  ‘Now?’ She pretended that it hardly mattered where they went. ‘Let’s get out of Lafney for a bit, that’s the chief thing.’ She let go the brake and the gentle tremor of the moving car brought on a rush of happiness as illogical as it was unfounded.

  ‘Oughtn’t we to round by the back drive?’ he asked, remembering Mrs Crawford.

  ‘Why?’

  He was unable to check himself. Subtlety was degenerating into obtuseness. He floundered. ‘I thought she—your mother might see us—might wonder at us taking the car, I mean. We did say we were going for a walk …’

  She knew this was true, but refused to be reminded of it. The very fact that Richard was insisting on doing so in his muddled, lame way, only heightened her deliberation. She turned the car in a swift, too-generous arc round the front lawns and noticed with perverse satisfaction that her mother was staring out of the drawing-room window. It was a second only, in which Mrs Crawford’s features, set against the black opaque oblong of the window, glowed snowily like the negative of a snapshot.

  ‘We won’t have to open the gates,’ she said in an even, pleasant tone which was really an apology. ‘The little runner things got stuck when they tarred the drive last summer.’ He nodded, but didn’t answer and as she manoeuvred her way through the town, she forced herself to see him as she thought he would want to be seen. He was more vulnerable than she had reckoned and he could still sulk—in which case, she decided, he must be more involved with childhood than she had credited. Men were. The complex fusion of cruelty and love, immediate reality and protracted romanticism, never quite left them. When women were adult, they were so in a way a man could never be. If by any chance a man did approach this kind of maturity he at once became suspect. To be really grown-up meant—in the popular fancy at least—some lessening of his maleness.

  As though he followed this argument, Richard pulled himself up from his slumped position and said, ‘Here, let me have a go.’

  ‘It’s not quite like an ordinary car,’ she said unwillingly. ‘You have to know it.’

  ‘You forget that I do know it.’

  They were on the coast road now. Behind them, Lafney, its slatey little core a smirch of one grey on the lighter, more drained greyness of the sky, looked trivial and neglected. She drew in to the side and heard the tyres scrunching over the shingle and saw the disturbed gulls waddle off across the seer, shrivelled-up plantains and heard the sea aching against the beach. They got out and changed seats and at once she found herself unexpectedly glad.

  ‘I take it that it’s to be Dunwich,’ said Richard, pulling out a badly-folded ordinance survey map from the string rack over their heads. A few poor brown flowers fell from its creases.

  ‘But haven’t we decided on all that?’

  ‘Have we? Okay. If you say so.’

  Taking great care because he thought she might be still in her highly critical mood, he drove on, saying, ‘Then Dunwich it is.’

  ‘Honestly, you’d think we were off to Xanadu!’

  They both laughed at this. It was so obviously true.

  ‘I can’t ever remember it being anything like an adventure before,’ said Mary. ‘I think they took us there because there was never anything to do except bathe and eat buns. Quentin was always bursting to get to Southwold just because it had a pier and deck-chairs.’

  ‘Did he?’ asked Richard, ‘—was he, I mean. You seem to remember more of those days than I do.’

  It was a hint that she should remember no more, but it didn’t offend her in the least. ‘I know …’ she said with surprising contentment. ‘Richard …’

  ‘Mmmm?’

  ‘Oh, nothing!’

  ‘In that case,’ he answered, regarding her with amusement, ‘we’ll blame old Yockers. He’s rather flattened us out, hasn’t he!’

  ‘He may have,’ she admitted, ‘although I don’t mind him really, do you?’

  ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t mind anybody really. Real minding presumably comes later—don’t you think?’

  She acknowledged that it did, or that it might, though rather hesitantly and vainly attempting to extract any note in her voice that she cared personally. A state forest came into view; acres and acres of shivering little larches planted with military precision in the sandy gorse wastes leading to the sea. Washed up on a slight mound was Blythburgh church, the bare bones of Gothic, yet defiantly exquisite still, as fresh as a gull and as brittly perfect as starched Mechlin.

  ‘Oh, isn’t it lovely! Go slower—don’t you always love it, Richard!’

  He stared at it obediently, though acknowledging to himself that it was a too-familiar loveliness ever to genuinely stir him again. The Parthenon must be a pretty hackneyed sight to the Athenians. At the same moment he saw her face, turned away to the cold landscape, her eyes very bright and the skin over her cheek-bones, taut and crisp with a delicate wintriness. Her beauty relieved him. It existed—he hadn’t fancied it, although he had been nearer to it a thousand times more often than he had to the famous beauty of this building. The miracle was that he could have ever considered her without such a beauty! The too-cambered lane sent them lurching towards each other. His leg fell across the gear heavily and jostled against hers.

  She said, ‘I’m longing to have a walk,’ and stretched away from him, both the movement and the words drawn from her by some priggish involuntary reaction she was unable to control. ‘How funny to come here in winter—it was always August before …’

  ‘It’ll be muddy.’

  ‘I wasn’t quite thinking of that.’

  He remembered that he had said nothing in the way of thanks for the lunch; worse, that in some way he had caused her to apologize for her mother and the rector. Now that he came to think about it, it hadn’t been so bad—amusing really. Quentin would have extracted his ounce of pleasure from it. ‘Old Yockers was in pretty good form,’ he said.

  She looked at him quickly, surprised to find him still thinking about something which seemed to have happened a hundred years ago. ‘Mr Yockery——? He isn’t so bad,’ she said defensively.

  Richard caught at her mood. ‘He must be awfully lonely.’

  ‘I expect he must be,’ she replied flatly, making it plain now how little she cared. ‘Look!’

  ‘What——?’ He craned towards to the windscreen.

  ‘It’s gone.’ It was a squirrel.

  After this, harmony became the high essential. Richard discovered himself slipping into the new situation with easy complaisance. The simplicity of it appalled him. He tried to force his imagination along towards an ardency which would at least add to his self-respect, but the more he did so, the more his amiable languor persisted. He could even be faintly amused, and this proved his detachment as nothing else possibly could. He wondered what Mary was thinking. When he saw her face and its pensiveness in the imperfect mirror made by the stripped hedges darkly glowing behind the windscreen, he was vain enough to identify its expression with his own mood. She can’t get over it either! he thought. She thinks it’s astounding! Her stillness deceived him. He thought that she must be controlling a sort of gaiety, such as his own. He turned sharply to the right and the Alvis made a bee-line for the shore, but coasting first along the rim of a waste of sodden bracken. They passed the bare shape of the Priory gate, strung up in the frigid air like a well-picked Gothic wishbone. A few yards further and the Alvis drew up knowingly by the sullen dunes.

  ‘Brrr!’ he said, ‘I think it looks awful—I think I’ll stay here …’ He leant back in his seat to help pull the deep fur collar of her coat snugly round her ears, finding it essential to touch her.

  ‘It
makes me cold—even in summer,’ she confessed in a dull, abstract voice. ‘Perhaps because it’s no place. It’s nowhere. It was, but it isn’t. It’s like an old woman tottering to the grave under the weight of her great name. She knows, and the whole world knows that she’s the last of the de-somethings. But yet she might just as well not be. There’s nothing left to prove it, no lurking distinction, no beauty, no wit, nothing at all. This is Dunwich—but what proves that?’

  ‘The Priory might.’

  ‘You find that sort of ruin anywhere.’

  ‘I know—the bones!’

  ‘Oh,’ she protested, as if against a new coldness. ‘The bones—I’d quite forgotten them … I don’t suppose we could see them?’

  ‘Why not—except it will be terribly muddy.’

  ‘You’re always saying things like that,’ she accused him. ‘Are they for me or for yourself—yourself, I think. You must know by now that sort of comfort means nothing to me.’

  ‘You’re sharp: you shouldn’t be. And you’re far too literal. There has to be this kind of padding in life to keep it from being all deeds and—and …’ He turned away, more injured by her unannounced little stabs of brusqueness than he could possibly explain. She had the power immediately to cast him down. He heard her speaking, in a quick, light, uncomprehending way which might almost be called insensitive, until he understood that her sudden hardnesses were really no more than rapid plots to maintain a new degree of happiness. It was not himself that she was fighting, but the entire pattern of her own uneventful life.

  ‘No,’ she was saying, ‘I simply can’t agree. I’ve had quite a struggle to keep my head above the upholstery!’ She gave him a quick smile to acknowledge the absurdity of their metaphor as well as to admit that she had said some word out of place—although heaven knew what it could be—she was sorry. They had the long, damp bonnet of the Alvis between them. The historical sense crept back into her mind. Where they stood, where reeds carried on their barren little penance, whipping and cutting across each other everlastingly; had been a street, an aisle, a court. Where they stared over the gravely gorging sea, there had once been roofs and spires and hopes. Fat cold porpoises surfaced where the bishop’s gardens had sunk, and in the second in which their silence multiplied, a few more grains of England fell and were sucked away by the tide. The mere inexorable ritual of it could present greater fears than any they might contrive, as it could also, were it heeded, ravage and isolate their love. With such a desolation flaunting its strength before her she was utterly contrite for her burst of nerves had temper. She wanted to rush round to his side, take him and kiss his mouth; to feel that certainty of contact—there was always this immense distance about him which lent him a spurious innocence—which only his body provided.