A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Now he was taking her hand, holding it up to his face, absorbing its whiteness and the pale red paint so carefully applied to her long, narrow nails; opening and closing her fingers with a proprietary sensuality. Then, to atone for this crude examination, he began to kiss her wrist. ‘That’s better,’ she felt she ought to say—as if her hurts were to be healed as easily as that!

  ‘No,’ she protested, when his hand wandered about the huge buttons fastening her coat.

  ‘But I love you …’ he said in an astounded, muffled, voice.

  I’m too aware, too conscious, she thought. If only I didn’t see myself failing, hear myself saying these grotesque things! Instead there was her own voice adeptly returning the appropriate sentences. ‘I love you,’ she was saying, effortlessly, meaninglessly; like a charm against the plague. But there was one immediate consolation. For the first time in her whole life she felt no longer alone. Shadows from the past coalesced with the uncertain present, nudging each other with the awful familiarity of passengers who have travelled for years on a regular bus route. I could have had this before, she deliberated—it wasn’t love in its actual, longed-for state. It was really (and here she shrank, even to think of it), a very ordinary need. She had been abstemious and grudging in her treatment of it, and really it should have dwindled to very little. Yet it had not. Desire had been in hiding—a coward most likely and had now been discovered. She faced it as a stranger, with neither relief nor concern, seeing it as she saw everything else at that moment, with a hideous detachment. That is why she could tolerate the tense exploration of the hand near her breast; why, although she trembled, she did not flinch. Only she wished with all her heart that it had not been him, Quentin’s brother, Edwina’s child and, not so long since it seemed, her own frequent charge. Lovers should be strangers first. It was better so.

  Between his caresses and his words—the same words, cruel and consoling, which were little more than an abracadabra requisite for the occasion, she saw the snow, or rather, felt it; flake after flake falling against the car and against her mind, as well as two bright parallels of it streaming from the headlights. Watching it descend was like a drug. Each settling speck of it helped to submerge reality. Soon there would be only this faultless whiteness covering everything, like a huge, clean paper upon which they might write anything they liked irrespective of what had been scribbled down before. It occurred to her, sadly and wryly, that it was only their immediate needs which were identical, her own halting and deperate, and his a sort of languorous greed. This then was an ‘affair’ … Her muddy shoe played nervously above the accelerator. I must be convinced, she insisted to herself. How—? By touch? By words? Perhaps if she could see him, that would infuse some truth into her realm of doubtful shadows. Drawing his head gently round towards the snowy light, she watched and waited. His eyes flickered across her own, intimate and amused.

  ‘Richard …’ she hesitated.

  His amusement declared itself blatantly.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried, hurt and bewildered. Her hands fell away from him like lead.

  Contrite beyond all words, he gathered her to him and when at last he thought he could explain, he did so in a vague, ordinary manner as if by destroying the warmth in words he might divest them of their meaning.

  ‘It was just the way you held my head—it made me think of the skull …’

  ‘That made you laugh?’

  ‘It should have made me weep, of course—Timor mortis conturbat me—as they say!’

  ‘Oh not yet!’ she protested—‘if that means what I think it does. Anyway, let’s forget about the skull. And talking of forgetting, what is the time?’

  ‘Six-ish.’

  ‘Heavens!’ She fumbled for the starter with abstract fingers.

  ‘Here—let me.’

  She shook her head. The car shuddered and ran forward over the unmarked snow. Driving with exactitude and rather slowly, she took care to observe the stripling forest and how the roadside trees, like a guard, dipped shade after shade before her. The mere fact of driving soothed her. She not only felt equable once more, but anxious that Richard should remember only the best of her, and that he could not do this if he still imagined that her temper had deserted her at Dunwich.

  ‘What will you do with it?’ she asked casually.

  ‘Take it back … perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, you won’t do that!’

  ‘If I don’t, I shall keep it. I might have it on my desk.’

  But already there was the burden of it, the regret of children after they have carried bluebells too far and the long, nude stalks have become accusative and hateful to them. He would liked to have tipped it out into the darkness—it would lodge somewhere under the blackthorns, happily and for good—but being adult brought its own onerousness and he couldn’t. Honour insisted that you stood by what a passing mood had ravished. The skull, lifted from its trickling, gritty context, was his. No one was likely to claim it of him; neither church nor state. Even the sea’s interest was limited to the indiscriminate appetite which caused it to feed on all it embraced. His motives for stealing it had been strictly poetic and that was that.

  A searchlight waggled an admonitory finger in their path. Another joined it and at once both became yellow antagonists jousting austerely in the barren sky. Lafney appeared, first the new bungalows, obsessed with their niceties of rockery and nomenclature; then the station sizzling with the six-forty, the engine hissing like a great hot bug; then the church, outrageously picturesque with every twitch of its Gothic titivated with winter; then the streets, modestly pretty and lastly, Meridian itself—alone incensed by the wind, the cold and the general bitterness, and aching for blossom and a gaudy sea.

  ‘It’s because I always associate life with literature—that’s why I do certain things. When I pinched the skull I wasn’t thinking of taste, I was thinking of Donne.’

  ‘So you equate all your behaviour with books?’

  ‘A good deal of it.’

  ‘You may have to change your ideas,’ she smiled, nodding in the direction of the searchlights which were now feeling their way through the thinner clouds with a kind of golden prurience.

  ‘I don’t see why,’ he demurred. ‘Wars have always had their word-spinners. When you come to think of it,’ he added, ‘what do either of us know about the last one beyond its actual literature? Only music—rubbishy music: and poetry that was indignant and fine, but is awfully dated now. Yet we know it couldn’t have been remotely like that—that’s the funny thing about writing of any sort, the worst or the best. It can’t ever say exactly.’

  Mary said: ‘Wars … books … you’re tying me up in knots. I think I must be in a peculiarly stupid mood.’ She laughed to imply some sort of compliment. Then, more seriously, ‘I expect it will be just the same next time. Civilization always likes to follow a precedent when it stages its massacres, don’t you think? The more ritual there is, the less feeling of guilt. They’ll even dig trenches again—you’ll see—although death was often less disgusting than life in them. I remember Daddy talking about it, the trench idea, and how it broke the spirit. How awful: I sound like Dean Inge!’

  ‘You think that they’ll prefer a trench to any newfangled battlefield?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s the devil they know,’ she answered a little wearily, immeasurably saddened by the way the conversation was going. The sadness made her weak. Privately to herself she was thinking, it won’t be the discomforts and horrors that will get me down if it does come; it will be the talk! She wanted to rest, to collect herself and to collect, too, every aspect of this curious day, which, at the moment, sprawled so bewilderingly in her brain. She was now committed to some other situation than the one she had awoke to this morning. She must examine it and herself as well.

  ‘Did you want to come in again?’ she enquired hesitantly.

  He liked her for asking this. Here was a devotion to his own private feelings which sheered away from formal politeness. From now on t
hey would have this particular kind of intimacy.

  ‘Not really—I’ve got to pack.’

  ‘Yes, you have. I wish we could just sit and talk. It’s because I’m so frightfullly tired all of a sudden. I want to talk, but I have nothing to say.’

  ‘Good night, dearest Mary.’

  She heard the door crunch dully as it fell against the snowy bank of the drive and felt the night assail their close, tobacco-ridden comfort with its glittering astringency. He bent across to kiss her and she knew it to be the last of the warmth. Straight ahead, in the direction they faced, Mrs Crawford switched on the dining-room lights and immediately the geometry of three tall windows ruled its problem over the snow. They watched her generous darkness pass from window to window, then Richard left.

  The car had slipped a vague regretful yard or two before she braked, wondering how she should call him. But he had remembered and returned in time to spare her lifting the skull from its snug tartan nest. The rug had faintly polished it to a primrose glimmer of bone and blackness.

  7

  IT was a week before he wrote in any way properly. During that time Mary had written twice, not letters in the actual full sense of the word, but a sentence or two that were like inky antennae reaching up from Mrs Crawford’s too-blue paper. He expected these notes, was pleased to get them and replied lightly in the same vein. When he did write at last—a double page of typing-paper—it was because for the first time since he returned to Copdock he felt morose and wretched. There is little so depressing for the newcomer to a scene than for him to be urged towards a hearty participation in its threadbare loyalties. If it was just a matter of reassuring the boys, Richard wouldn’t have cared. That sort of conduct was all right. But Mr Winsley was attempting to extract homage to Copdock itself. In his letter to Mary he complained,

  ‘This is a fearful hole after all, not in any physical sense, that is: I can eat the food and my gas fire keeps me fairly scorched—but in some other, hard-to-explain way. The teaching, you feel, is a game to hide a more violent activity. Now, of course, you’re going to say something about people with nasty imaginations! But it’s true all the same. The marvel is that anything happens in the school sense at all; yet it does. The class-rooms are neat, although they look a bit improvised and the old man squeezes a few more chaps through Common Entrance every year. Don’t ask me how it is done, it just is!

  ‘Much warmer today and slush everywhere. (Why, I wonder, do I write you this kind of stuff?) Shouldn’t I be more fond, although that isn’t quite right. I really mean, shouldn’t I set free the fondness I feel, so that it rushes across the paper and fills up every word like a little well of love? I’d do that even, if I thought you wouldn’t smile and go bustling off to see what your bad tempered old Hibble was up to. Anyway,

  Much love,

  R.

  P.S. Our relic has had to go on to the hat-shelf in the wardrobe. It’s too reproachful as a paper-weight. Would one be prosecuted for sending it through the post? I just thought that perhaps … Quenny … He loves surprises!’

  *

  The letter was a duty done. Strolling out to post it, he ran into Bateson who at once insisted on their going to a pub. Pubs were Bateson’s peculiar terrain. Once inside them he felt safe and secure. The more stifling the bar, the easier he breathed. They were his way of forgetfulness and his cosy remembrancer. He was never so happy, so little at variance with life, as when he plunged into their kindly cocoon of obfusc conversation. The ‘Golden Fleece’ was full. The painted china handles of the beer-engines rose and fell with bright authority. Smoke lay ravelled against the electric bulbs and hung about the leather-backed seats like the wraiths of dead customers.

  ‘A pint?’ suggested Bateson.

  Richard nodded.

  ‘Cheers,’ Bateson said carefully.

  The pub was full and kindliness crept through its various rooms in a treacly stream. The till rang triumphantly; little asterisks of profit flew gaily from its bell. A huge varnished fish, a pike, ogled them from a single glazed eye and above the roaring fire hung an oil painting of a gaunt racehorse with spindly fetlocks and crazed nostrils. Two brewers’ looking-glasses, opposite each other, carried Bateson’s image on and on through a whole suite of mysterious bars, accompanied each time by the faithfully reflected pike. The evening papers, the Standard and the Star, lay unopened on the rosewood piano.

  ‘The Winner isn’t keen on the staff showing up here,’ said Bateson. ‘It’s not so much drinking that he’s down on as any of us giving loyalty to anything outside the limits of the school itself. Or that is what I suspect.’

  All around them the mouths talked or sipped and the hands wagged eloquently; but the eyes remained curiously divorced from either interest. They just watched. And the landlord, a tall slender man until it came to his belly, which pressed forward like a sleek globe just above his belt, stared most of all.

  ‘The same, gentlemen?’ he enquired and their glasses tottered in his ginger-haired fist.

  ‘The same,’ said Richard, and Bateson muttered,

  ‘I give it a year—a year at the utmost.’

  ‘What, the school?’

  ‘The war—the school—life as it is.’

  ‘You do …?’ asked Richard, too eagerly. He had rolled into this job and was also slipping fecklessly and with too little passion into the Lafney situation. The idea of war at that moment flickered with a lurid romantiscism, like the lightning quivering across Toledo in an El Greco picture. That was how it must always appeal to the young, he thought, recognizing in his own callousness a crude release from too many loving hands and later on, a rough and inevitable glory. How Bateson would shine! His was the hero-martyr type to an almost ostentatious degree. If it came, the whole youth of England would wish to look, stand and move like Bateson. Talk like him as well, throwing away their intentions in a series of short, brash, slang-raked little sentences. It would be the Batesons’ hour; the Batesons would lead and inspire because the Batesons could act!

  Bateson at that moment was thinking hard. He had the sort of features which, when not animated, set themselves with a parvenu ease into the highest roles of taste, intelligence and distinction. A physical accident had endowed him at birth with most of what blood, brains and striving might in the normal way have taken centuries to amass. He was fool enough to be rather ignorant of this and would often put up a great fight with his flimsy learning, where a mere charming gesture would have seen him through. And this, of course, only added to his charm. He was like the immensely rich whose dividends increase so helplessly. He moved his glass round and round in a shiny beer ring on the bar. His hand was pensive and priestly in its whiteness—the kind of hand which never needed washing and which made few involuntary movements.

  ‘I might as well tell you‚’ he said, ‘I’m thinking pretty seriously of signing-on——’ and was rewarded by Richard’s immediate look of interest and concern. ‘Oh it won’t be for a month or two‚’ he explained. ‘I don’t intend to just clear out and upset the old apple-cart.’

  The landlord tilted his narrow head at this and tut-tutted regretfully. ‘The news was bad‚’ he agreed. His missus had just been listening to the nine o’clock. Hitler was moving troops about and he himself had been digging a hole in the garden all the afternoon to put an air-raid shelter in—although he thought it was a complete waste of time in a place like Stourfriston. The old men seated round the bar, farm-workers, labourers; yet entirely unidentifiable as to the specific purpose to which their long, calm lives had been put, heard the landlord silently, their eyes light coloured and staring with the peculiar fixity of the victim. Peace, war—it was all so far out of their hands that there was nothing they could say. They bought more beer and returned with it to their settles to drink it with grave politeness.

  ‘Won’t they have quite a bit of difficulty in getting someone in your place at the school?’

  ‘Certain to have‚’ replied Bateson flatly, and Richard, looking at
him, was bound to agree that it didn’t matter. The school had served its purpose by providing for its founder’s wants for half a century. Now, Vale!—or very shortly that. Miss Bellingham, in her cluttered eyrie, was already tying up time-stained runs of the Quarterly and Hibbert Journal, cremating in the grate letters, bills and notes and anything else likely to gratify an avid executor; shaking her books and astonishing herself with the prophetic inaccuracies of the press-cuttings that fell from them; drinking brandy whenever that whim took her and altogether faintly rejoicing in the frugal finale of a selfish life. Although her total migrations may have taken her no further than ‘the blue bed to the brown’ she was content. She had had power and some bizarre affections. Now, when she was ready, she would depart. She would not be ‘taken’—she would go. Miss Bellingham regretted one thing only; that at a time when life was promising to be inordinately amusing, she must leave it. Upstairs in her hot, smothered room she practised an unseemly laughter at the expense of Mr Winsley as he waited, rusty gown spread out to catch his academic windfall, knowing that he would only receive a sucked orange. Bateson, old Canon Ribbs, who took part-time scripture; prim, careful, unwedded Mr M’Tooley, the maths master—even Richard himself, so late to the scene—could all see what Mr Winsley was utterly blind to—the fact that Copdock House School was finished. That is, of course, if he did not possess a singular vision of his own—Nimium ne crede colori; fronti nulla fides, as he might prefer to explain it—and had high hopes of instilling new life into the ramshackle place. Yet one only had to take a quick look at Mr Winsley to realize how unlikely it would be for him to instil life into anything. He hadn’t enough puff left to improve a balloon.