A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

This was daring because it at once reduced wrath to testiness and any grief that might come from it to an indulgence. ‘Fuss’ insinuated all that. There was also the unpleasant fact, which ever way Mrs Crawford looked at it, that Mary was, after all, independent. It was something she must never forget. She wheeled round slowly in her seat.

  ‘You know Mummy never minds so long as she is told.’

  ‘Oh’ … said Mary, momentarily floored by this saccharine departure into nursery-land.

  ‘And wrap up warm, dear.—Poor Father Yockery, he’ll be so disappointed. He has a nephew coming to stay—the one who is hoping to be a scientist. John, isn’t it? And the Faculty are going to let him have a new altar—isn’t that nice! What about your lunch—what shall you do about food?’ She stood up, pinching the heavy silk of her frock into place over her fat hips. Then, casting a searching look over the tablecloth all marked with toast-dust, she said, making it sound the most ordinary thing in the world, ‘I’m told they do one awfully well at Stourfriston “Eagle” that is, should you find yourself that way …’

  Why I don’t say I’m lunching with Dick Brand and have done with it, Heaven only knows, Mary told herself. But she didn’t say it.

  *

  ‘But I can’t understand it‚’ he protested.

  ‘No‚’ she agreed sadly, ‘who could?’

  Coming along in the car the first doubts had assailed her. The day was too majestically perfect. You could bite into it and taste clean, cold gold. The naked hedges fled by and new ploughing had tipped up the fields in long, wet, silvery slivers. Country people darted in and out of cottages that were like nests, and because she wasn’t obliged to linger in them and suffer their crippling proprieties, the Sunday streets of sleepy villages had seemed to her unspeakably elegant in their self-conscious quiet. Once she stopped and walked to the tip of a little hill and the wind rushed against the back of her head and drove her hair forward in a fine drift against her cheeks. She could have stretched her arms out then. It was that kind of peace, that dancing realization of happiness.

  ‘Well, I’m glad you’ve come‚’ Richard said. He hesitated, aware that she was searching for sincerity in his words and actions.

  ‘—I am—honestly …’

  ‘I’m glad as well‚’ she confessed. ‘Where are we going to eat? I thought I was invited to lunch.’

  ‘Soon. You were. But first I’ve got to exhibit you at Copdock—I was bound to promise that. It seems that this Sunday was a bit difficult. Not really you know. The Winner just likes to make it sound like that. He’s waiting with sherry now, so we’ll have to go.’

  She found the school shocking, much worse than she had imagined. The staleness met her as she entered. The staircase was like a shute down which outdated instruction swept in a muddied eddy to the classrooms. One room was open and she caught a glimpse of a waxy yellow wall-map and a splintery floor with protuberant knots standing up out of its boards like bunions. An overgrown, loutish-looking boy crouched in a little cast-iron desk with his back towards them.

  ‘They write home on Sunday‚’ explained Richard.

  Mary’s charming velvet suit, which had started out with such a demure pleasurableness in the morning-room at Meridian, progressed to a delightful extravagance when she had unkindly compared it with the dumpy respectability of the farmers’ wives bustling to church and had, in the vivid January sunshine flooding Stourfriston, returned full-circle to the joy she had felt when her eye discovered it in the Upper Berkeley Street shop, suddenly slumped in her regard. She was too got-up and they would stare. Richard, walking a step or so in front, she noticed, sharing this feeling, but in another way. He was also too got-up, not in clothes, but in the vitality of his body, in his hair shaking forward across his forehead, hair which looked so cloudy and fine, but which she remembered was rough and coarse. Humpson, their gardener, she recalled, used to have a refuse place, a compost heap, she supposed it must have been, from which she used to rescue the house-flowers that were not quite dead. No one ever knew the anguish it cost her as a child to find carelessly thrown-away blooms in that stagnant corner. She would snatch them from the top of the rotting mass and nurse them in jam-jars lined up in the stable windows until their very last petal had fallen. No need to go any further, she told herself: I know the kind of wastefulness which goes on here …

  ‘Richard—’

  ‘Mmm?’ He swung round and said, ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to barge ahead like that, I was just trying to find out where they’d all got to.’

  ‘Perhaps they aren’t really expecting us,’ she said hopefully.

  ‘You mean perhaps you’ve got cold feet!’

  ‘Perhaps I have.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said comfortably. ‘They only want to be polite.’

  Would ‘politeness’ extend to her having to meet that dreadful old woman upstairs, she wondered. Would she descend, like some fearful female prophet, a kind of transvestist Elisha with cats in her wake (they always had cats and tight little caps of hair like pot-scourers and infinite opinions on endless subjects. They were also atheistical; admirers of Beethoven, Edward Carpenter, Nietzsche, Thomas Huxley and Alfred Munch, and they didn’t bathe; at least, not much.) One thing was certain—and she couldn’t but help feeling rather pleased with herself for knowing it—and that was the perilous fascination of their ambiguous natures. With absolute lack of justice she allotted Miss Bellingham two heads, not realizing that a more single-minded person had rarely existed. But she was right about the baths.

  They passed two or three blank brown doors and then came to the visitors’ room—it said so—VISITORS—in cracked black paint over the liver colour. The boy who was writing the letter, started up, thrust a blotchy face towards them and said, ‘That’s right, Sir; in there.’

  ‘I still haven’t got the hang of the place,’ Richard said.

  Mary smoothed her skirt nervously and unnecessarily and stepped into what at first appeared to be an enormous copy of one of those iron and stained-glass electric lanterns. The wallpaper was patterned in a frolicsome disorder of heroic chrysanthemums and grapes, and a stem of gas-piping, descending dizzily from a decoration the colour of soiled sugar-icing, flowered into six pink glass canterbury-bells. The carpet complemented the rash harvest of the walls with a perplexing exercise in dusty Turkey-work. She saw the slippery sofa and the Benares table and like odalisques, because of their frozen interest, the staff.

  ‘Ha! Brand, come and have a drink.’

  ‘This is Mr Winsley.’ said Richard. ‘Mr M’Tooley, Mrs Winsley, Canon Ribbs—’ He stopped, brought to a halt by a fluffyheaded middle-aged woman clasping the Book of Common Prayer in one hand and a sherry glass in the other.

  ‘Miss Ribbs—my niece,’ explained the Canon.

  ‘Miss Crawford,’ Richard said. But the fluffy woman made not the slightest effort to further the introductions and stared at him with an intensity that by-passed the personal and entered the purely objective. Later he was to understand that that was ‘her way’. She went out very rarely and when she did, she made the most of it.

  ‘We are glad to see you here‚’ said Mr Winsley to Mary. He presented her with sherry as though she had won it. ‘We don’t—as I expect you can guess—have the pleasure of a great number of visitors nowadays. But it hasn’t always been like this, oh no!’ He looked round the chilly, cluttered room for some confirmation of its ancient glories and his eye fell upon Mrs Winsley. ‘Tell Miss Crawford, my dear, how we used to do things!’

  ‘Miss Crawford won’t want to hear all about our old parties, I’m sure!’ smiled Mrs Winsley, tilting her face towards Mary in a pretty gesture unconsciously borrowed from Zena Dare. Her huge eyes swam with a dogged girlishness and her cheeks were pushed out into two podgy little hillocks of pleasantry. She put up a hand and explored her springy curls. ‘We did hope that Mr Bateson was going to be here to meet you,’ she said in a puzzled voice, ‘but it seems that he has gone out …’

  ‘Th
at reminds me of an anecdote I heard recently—or I may have read it,’ began Mr M’Tooley. Then he stopped abruptly and peered down into his sherry. This action was perfectly understood by everybody except Richard, who imagined that the story had been quelled by some reminder of seemliness on Mr Winsley’s part. As he thought this was bringing classroom ethics far too near their private lives, he urged,

  ‘Well let’s hear it,’

  ‘Do,’ beseeched Mrs Winsley.

  ‘I forget it rather,’ Mr M’Tooley said off-handedly. ‘Apparently a friend enquired for André Gide at his Paris hotel and the porter said something like, “Ah, Monsieur Gide … he is always going out …”’ There was a stifling silence and Mr M’Tooley added, ‘We were talking about Bateson—he’s not here and somehow it reminded me …’

  A frond of ancient pampas grass rustled from its vase on the lofty chimmneypiece into the grate and was burnt up with unsuspected brilliance in the hot ashes.

  ‘Is that all?’ asked Mr Winsley complainingly.

  ‘I think,’ said Mary, ‘I see the sadness of it.’

  Mr M’Tooley shot her a look of gratitude mixed with apprehension.

  ‘Paris hotels are dreadfully uncomfortable,’ declared Mrs Winsley, dimly recalling the whole duty of hostesses. ‘What was the name of that one we stayed in, Cadman—do you remember? The Pandore … the Panache—Pan-something, I know! It was behind the Jardin des Plantes and I always remember saying that that was where all those little insects must have come from. They were all over the place, my dear‚’ she went on, turning to Mary, ‘absolutely harmless, except it was like treading on spilt sugar when one went to bed.’

  ‘Isn’t it curious.’ Mr Winsley observed to Richard, the smile on his thin lips laced with the merest ghost of his annoyance, ‘how the female mind retains the husks of experience only. My wife, you see, has quite forgotten the Russian Ballet although a few Parisian earwigs would seem to have made an indelible impression. What about the Russian Ballet, Minna?’ he demanded in a loud voice.

  Mrs Winsley, who had just begun a conversation about Today’s Young People with Mary, looked round in alarm.

  ‘The Russian Ballet …?’

  ‘Who was the little girl who adored Njinski?’ enquired Mr Winsley with frightful playfulness.

  Mrs Winsley arched her throat like Zena Dare again and said very softly, ‘Oh, Caddie, I’d quite forgot.’

  ‘A a ahh … breathed Mr Winsley. His rigid finger waggled admonishment across the room. ‘And the Pantheon and the Place du Tertre …’

  Mrs Winsley gripped Mary’s arm and laughed in her pretty, soft way. ‘The Pantheon,’ she said triumphantly. ‘My dear, I remember now; our hotel was called Les Ambassadors … You know it? It’s that one with the prickly roof immediately behind the Jardin des Plantes. What makes one forget things, do you suppose? What causes it, do you think?’

  ‘Being busy, of course‚’ smiled Mary. ‘I expect you help a good deal with running the school?’

  ‘We all help in our way.’ She let her eyes travel from one person to the next with a limpid, but rather fatuous regard.

  ‘What I really meant‚’ insisted Mary, ‘was, do you do any of the teaching? Or perhaps you help more with the administration?’

  Mrs Winsley at once became deceitful. For forty years it had been drummed into her that what went on inside Copdock was a private affair. ‘Don’t let them question you‚’ Cadman had said. It was her single well-learnt lesson.

  ‘My husband’s the one you must ask about those things‚’ she retorted tartly.

  ‘I’m sorry‚’ said Mary swiftly. This was the limit. So she was to be judged by their own prying little standards—unless the woman was an utter simpleton, but there she couldn’t be sure. That girly-girly attitude might hide anything; tenacity, astuteness—some private world the path to which, though of roses, would certainly turn out to be of the thorniest kind. Looking around, she thought of Richard as a feckless, rather than a helpless victim thrown to a cluster of decrepit lions which, though too enfeebled to gobble him up, still had enough power left in them to impair his spirit. Somewhere on high, lodged in a wickerwork chair between the dormitory ceiling and the slates, she remembered, was Miss Bellingham. Not a lion in the ordinary Winsley sense, but something more fabulous, more mythical and so something to be more chary of—someone infinitely dangerous. As she took a discreet look at her watch—she just managed to flash a glance at her wrist and catch its reciprocal glitter of time and gold—the door opened and Bateson came in.

  She knew it was Bateson. She had seen him many times. Straddled against the spinnaker of a coasting yacht, wind-raked in an unthrottled Bentley, as Leander diving off the pier, as Orlando returning with the West Suffolk Hunt, as Paris’s performing wonders at the monthly hop at the Athenaeum and as a Burne-Jones archangel in church; kind, brave and mindless, there he was, the English paradigm—Bateson.

  ‘Gosh—I’m sorry‚’ he said.

  ‘Never mind, never mind!’ boomed Mr Winsley. Sherry had nourished his normally diffident voice and his jocose remarks were bounding around the room in the most audible way.

  ‘Oh Mr Bateson!’ Mrs Winsley cried. She fluttered to the Indian table, raised up the lone bottle of Tio Pepe it supported and exclaimed, ‘Oh goody! I think we shall just manage it.’

  Mr M’Tooley at once placed his palm over his glass and said, meaningly, in what was very obviously a nudge to the rest of the company, ‘Not for me, Mrs Winsley.’

  ‘Not for you … she sighed. ‘Really …’

  ‘Really.’

  Mrs Winsley said, ‘Lovely sherry party’ and returned the bottle with such abruptness to the inlaid picture of a Peshawar court which made up the top of the table that its obvious emptiness reverberated sadly through their talk and caused Mr Winsley to spread his arms as though the awkward little group were a brood of fourth-formers which had to be hustled out to play.

  But this was too precipitous for Mrs Winsley. There were questions she had still to ask: important ones. There was young Mr Brand lolling against the brown and grey marble fireplace which had always struck her as looking like cleverly arranged brawn. His glass swung upside down between his fingers and his eyes were two intensely dark lines because of the way he was watching the hearth-rug, an absorption accentuated by the way in which the Canon’s niece watched him. Mr Brand, decided Mrs Winsley, was really nice. A clergyman’s son. She had traced it all in an old Crockford; ‘John Launcey Brand, M.A. Wilt. Coll. Ox., B.A. 1912; M.A. 1914. d. 1915 p. 1916. C. in charge S. Saviour, Owleaton, Salop. 1917–20. R. of Lafney, dio, Ipswich and S. Eds., Suffolk. Hon. Chap. R.N.L.I. Address: S. Prolixia’s R. Lafney. Publications: The Pauline Dilemma. What is the Matter with Our Missionaries?’ Those were the kind of antecedents which promoted confidence! She found it not difficult to imagine that dedicated home, with the gentle brothers (she had discovered that there were two of them), the wife—the mother—the widow … Really Mrs Winsley could weep! Soon, quite soon, perhaps, there must be further privations. It was in the nature of things that there should be. No one could go on for ever—not even her—the name musn’t be breathed in case Caddie should hear; because the very idea of her going drove him into a passion. Why? she wondered. It would be—what did they call it—a blessed release. And then Copdock, everything, would be his, Cadman’s. That was why Mr Brand was so important. He might not have a degree, but he was the right stuff—wasn’t that what her darling Daddy had called it! The right stuff—and he certainly was. Just then she became perturbed. Why was that old bitch Muriel Ribbs clutching at Mr Brand like that, and why did she have to stare so. And who did this tall, cool girl who was rather too much dressed-up for them, say she was? It really was awful the way she forgot things!

  “Have you known—have you and Mr Brand been friends for long?’

  ‘Ages‚’ smiled Mary.

  ‘Really …’

  This was giving more astonishment than Mary intended. ‘We were children toget
her‚’ she explained and then realised her error at once. Mrs Winsley’s speedwell eyes dragged themselves away from the fireplace to run doubtfully over Mary’s person. She’s staring at my ears, Mary thought. Urgh! how terrible! And Mrs Winsley reflected, she’s showing her ears because they’re pretty, in which case she can’t be so sure of her more ordinary features! She congratulated herself for being wise enough to observe this. The suit was lovely, although it wouldn’t do for her; the colour was wrong. Strawberry, she supposed. Who did she say she was …? A childhood friend …? How could she be! She would have asked more questions, but Mary was moving away. Mrs Winsley could see that she longed to snap on her black suede gloves and leave—which was odd when you came to think of it, the girl not having been inside the house twenty minutes!

  Just then Bateson began to make his way towards Mary. Like a Hatton Garden merchant confronted with a tray of miscellaneous stones, his eyes, too candid with what they required, too certain of their getting it, hardly noticed the rest of the company before they met her own. She attempted to withdraw, in fact did drag herself back a fraction from his downright stare, but even then, although not truly focussed, she held her own views in this wilful transaction until, rather furious with herself, she turned away. Even then she knew the wide, clear but almost colourless pupils were absorbing her and the barrenness of this attraction almost shocked her. All the men she had previously known had reserved for her the ‘look-oblique’. The compliment, the interest—or whatever it was—was snuffed out immediately she was in moments of interpreting it. Being the creatures hand-picked by her mother for Meridian, there was little wonder in this. Their reasons for not taking her seriously were reflected in their gait, or in the way they brushed their hair, or in their subservience, or in their arrogance (which is often the same thing turned inside out). Every summer they arrived for tennis—‘a little party, darling, won’t that be nice!’ as Mrs Crawford called these occasions in her special ‘treat’ voice—and every winter for bridge, or just a good dinner. ‘I thought William Strangly, darling … He’s home again and will be able to tell us exactly what the Government is doing in Lucknow.’ So they came and went as winter furloughs succeeded summer leaves, and they were all polite and informative. And that was how her twenties had drifted by, without one of them ever having the gumption to realize that there is simply nothing more ageing than respect, and that there were times when she would have preferred their dislike to all their dreary considerateness. There were times too, in her mother’s flimsy sitting-room, as between them they scrawled out these tedious invitations, with the stumpy hyacinths prinked waxily against the pink wallpaper and the whole atmosphere plaintive with so much feminity; when she could have shouted, No! Feed these bores yourself! But don’t ask me to help you with what is rightfully mine—my youth, my imagination, my capacity for love! Why should it be rifled piecemeal by you to bolster up your own fading days? This, then, was what we meant by being ‘filial’—pouring back one’s own personal existence for the sake of its fountain-head; in her own case, accepting without cavil a vulgar Edwardianism with its spectrum of subtle snobberies! Fuming inwardly she would write, ‘Dear Doctor Miller, If you are free on Wednesday 6th please come and have dinner with us. Bill Strangly will be here and Mr Yockery …’ And they came and they talked and by their bloodless good manners they contrived to lessen the fact that she was young and she was a woman.