The sun, soaking through the window, drew out the warm, winey heart of the room, exchanging the cosiness for its own cold March brilliance.
‘You must realise,’ said Helen slowly, ‘that I cannot discuss things I don’t know about and even if I did know about them, that I couldn’t be disloyal in any way to Mary.’
‘I’m not asking you to be disloyal, as you call it. I wouldn’t ask anybody to be that. No, not a cake, thank you. You mustn’t take me up, as they say.’
‘No, of course not. I’m dreadfully sorry.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘All I meant was that Mary does as she likes, she’s—’
‘She doesn’t,’ interrupted Mrs Crawford fiercely; ‘none of us does. Do you believe that we are here to “do as we like”?’
‘We have certain freedoms, freedoms that are ours alone.’
Mrs Crawford’s bed scrunched heavily. For an anxious moment Helen thought she was going to get out of it. But she was only raising herself up to say what she had to say. Her mouth was pursed in its old ‘organising’ line.
‘That is not what I was told, Mrs Gascoigne,’ she declared rudely, ‘long ago, you understand …?’ Her angry head nodded to the Court lady on the tallboy. ‘There were other things.’
Helen, sounding braver than she felt, said, ‘I suppose you mean the conventions?’
‘You don’t lessen a thing by giving it a stuffy name. Why not say “duty”?’
‘I can’t go on from here,’ replied Helen with more calm than she could possibly have believed herself to possess. ‘Perhaps I do mean duty. I don’t know. I haven’t been told. If Mary goes out, it’s just because she must. To me it doesn’t appear unreasonable. The real pity is that you are ill.’
‘But she lies to me.’
‘She doesn’t mean to. It is not her intention. It is part of her escape.’ She said this too hurriedly and realised her mistake at once. Mrs Crawford pounced.
‘Then you do know!’
‘I only feel that it is like this.’
‘In that case you might like me to fill in a few gaps for you.’ As Mrs Crawford sank into her bed it was like watching her sink into herself. Her warm bulk became quite divorced from the cold liveliness of her eyes. ‘Mary is making a fool of herself over young Dick Brand who has two hundred a year and an increasingly good opinion of himself.’
Helen, toying with tea-cups and with the idea of leaving, thought, Stella’s brother! What was so terrible about that? He would be a bit young, perhaps. People were no more than this to her; a bit young, a scrap older—what possible difference could it make? Very much relieved at the ordinariness of the situation and allowing for the fact that Mrs Crawford, having had a daughter on her hands, for so long, so to speak, would naturally feel deprived of some of her contentment if Mary placed herself in another’s grasp, she still couldn’t help but say, ‘But the Brands are nice. Two hundred a year isn’t much, I know; but Dick—isn’t he the clever one? He’s bound to do better. Anyway I must say I always liked them.’
‘Them or him?’
‘Oh, Stella, Dick—the tall thin boy, what was his name? And, of course, darling Mrs Brand. How is she, incidentally?’
‘Edwina? Very well indeed I should think. But what was it that you liked about them? What is it that you remember them by?’
Still a trifle nonplussed, but suspecting it to be a time of returning benevolence, Helen confessed to a cosy regard for the past. Like Meridian, like Mrs Crawford even, the Brands were part and parcel of her childhood and of those singularly memorable years of it which verge on puberty. The purest, most heart-breaking degree of childhood occurs then. Whoever recalls being eight? Whoever forgets being twelve … Stella’s the only one I really remember. The boys were babies.’
‘They haven’t changed!’
‘Oh!’ Was this mirth? Was light coming through? Was she to laugh …? She looked ahead, out from the confusions to where the elms, faintly green, bent inland from the sea; a sea forgetting to be sinister and glinting with gaieties. A windlass cracked. She was just about to believe in this suspected transformation, when Mrs Crawford, in a stifled voice as if what she was saying and what she was thinking bore no relationship, said, ‘And now, when you’ve seen what you want, be good enough to close my window.’
Helen, when she remembered this later, was more shocked by her own immediate anger than by the cause of it. To be spoken to like that! What right had Mrs Crawford—anybody—to such behaviour! Here she was at Lafney, a nowhere if you like, being bludgeoned into its ways! Lafney, with its gossip that was like bubbles from a puddle, and its cramped little acts. She saw at once how different was her own life. Utterly, utterly, utterly. Perhaps one shouldn’t return—to do so, or not to do so, was a threadbare problem. Yet how the heart insisted upon it! Go on, murmurs that pleasantly civilized thing, the mind. Go back! urges the darkling heart: remember what fun it was when you were twelve! How the trees were a thousand feet high, how beautiful the friends, how the sea used to sing as it raced up the beach, how you ate banana sandwiches on a prairie-wide lawn under a golden-guinea sun, with Meridian Palace behind you and Mary’s mother, that nicest lady in the world, showing you how to play diabolo! Go back; return and find it all again! And so she had, and here she was—to find the glory gone. The kindness too. Yet not all of that. She would not include Mary. Mary’s change had been the less surprising because it had been conditioned by their mutal letters. And this disregarding the fact that letters can be almost the most misinforming things one can receive from another person. But Mary’s letters had been honest enough. Mary had read this and that, and Helen must too. (Could she get the latest Aldous Huxley in Freetown?) The Headlams had come and the Watson-Walkers had left. And very year they were going to get rid of the Alvis and have a Morris. That was one side of the letters. They had given Helen little grounding as to what she might expect when she returned to Lafney. The other aspect was a skilfully recollective campaign in which both she and Mary had each extended every particle of the experiences common to both of them. The things that were the bedrock of their friendship; their local ‘coming-out’, their long, talkative walks; their silly mistakes over boys; their mutal fear of Stella; these facts were tediously reiterated and enlarged upon and became the credo on which their entire companionship rested. All the rest of her schoolgirl friends had shrunk to a few accusing Christmas cards. But Mary remained. In her direction Helen was scrupulous and would always be so.
Helen was not simple, nor did she pretend to be. She enjoyed without apology the bright trappings of life. But she wasn’t brittle either. Beyond the limits of its formal contentment and candid worldliness, she had always recognised the need for a confessor in her existence. Strangely enough, it was in the letters arriving so regularly from Meridian House, letters which she was bound to acknowledge were mainly dull and concerned with things she had grown away from, that she found the perfect outlet for what, although she was bound to laugh when it occurred to her as such, was a certain spiritual side to her personality. They struck her as sane and accomplished and right. She couldn’t help feeling aggrieved when she found that things were likely to be just about as opposite to these states as it was possible to imagine. Mary of all people—and in this predicament! Helen felt she must do all she could to put things right. Her idol had not quite collapsed, but she could see it rocking precariously. She turned and fastened the window and then heard a clinking sound.
Mrs Crawford was busy at her medicine table.
‘May I …?’
‘I can manage, thank you.’
She drank the stuff, then drew back to her pillows in contentment, pleased with her self-created gloom, enjoying the swags of shadow and the swampy paleness of the bed and the warm tentative luxury she had produced by the careful placing of a few pieces of furniture and the dismissal of the sun. Here she could hoard her strength. There was now no longer the need to compete with the hackneyed tasks of everyday existence. Edwina
, occasionally catching her in this mood, began to wonder if her friend wasn’t growing insensible, torpid—until the liveliness of Mrs Crawford’s eyes convinced her of how unlikely that was. In fact she was alive in a way that she had never been before. She could be unkind without too much apology afterwards, because cruelty was what other people expected of invalids and she had no doubt that she was wonderful because she heard people saying so all the time. They meant, of course, that she was formidable. Only Stella hadn’t been intimidated—but then Stella hardly ever came to see her. Sickrooms were Stella’s Achilles’ heel. They reduced her to a kind of helpless misery, so she took care to keep away from them. She wrote instead, rather nice, gossipy letters which Mrs Crawford soon scrunched up and tossed into the brass scuttle, which was the same shape as a Roman helmet and which she kept for waste-paper. Like so much else, she liked to think that she had done with letters.
Helen collected the tea-things and asked if there was anything else she should do.
‘You could tell Mary about Sir Paul Abbott,’ said Mrs Crawford surprisingly.
‘But—won’t she know——?’ Perhaps it was something to do with Sir Paul’s latest book. Helen was entirely at a loss.
The bell from Lafney parish church began to toll agreeably in the distance for week-day Evensong. Mrs Crawford heaved herself back into the centre of the bed and said in a panting voice, ‘No she won’t and this might be quite a good time to tell her.’ She would say no more than this, so, mystified, though not particularly perturbed, Helen tiptoed out with the tray.
10
BUT to go back. Late in January Richard bicycled to Sheldon. He did so cautiously. The roads were onyx with the snow all crushed and darkened and laquered down into a frigid veneer across which the bicycle-lamp flung a petulant beam. The moon, which had stuck motionless outside the classroom window all the afternoon, as timid as damp tissue, now shone brilliantly as it swung free from flurries of snow. The snow, pitted against the moon was as black as that ground into the tarmac. In Stourfriston the green copper spire of the parish church, a slender, greaved, octagonal cone, shone like powdered jade. All the rest of the town grew perversely darker under the journeying cold. Streets spoked away crookedly from the market-place towards a forlorn periphery of allotments, bungalows and ice-thickened telegraph wires. The air against Richard’s face alternated between a humbling rawness, so stationary, he felt as though he was forcing his way through frozen blankets, and a jaunty, rakish wind which sprang up in a minute and died down as soon. The sudden gust would set the shop-signs screeching and the nervous flame in the gas-lamps would drag itself up in apprehension and, as this fear was commuted from lamp to lamp, a whole street would blanch and tremble. The bicycle, chose these moments to slither a little down the camber of the road. Richard hung on fatalistically, knowing that when the wheel should really slip he must fall. Under his tweed overcoat he was wearing his one really decent suit, and he was already regretting the fact. The tyres sang against the ice. His hands twisted against the pudgy rubber grips. The saddle plagued him in some way; it was Mr Winsley’s bicycle and there was a rectitude about it which somehow forbade any pleasure in riding it. It seemed to have been ordained. The reek of carbide from its bouncing lamp lent a certain credence to the general theological feeling.
He passed the Masonic Hall, which loomed out of the night like a wedge of pink cake, and then skirted the War Memorial. If the bronze woman who reached out with her laurels had been of feasible dimensions, her round limbs and naked breasts might have gathered a glance or two during all the years she had stood there balancing on one splendid foot. But she was immense, the town council of nineteen-twenty-four ostensibly believing that only the heroic was fit for heroes. Was she Demeter? Richard wondered, pedalling slowly by. Was she Maia, that luminous creature? Her head was bent. Sparse snow hung in the fillet wired bleakly across her brow. Snow, too, clung to her breasts. Whether the dying soldier at her feet reached out for these, or for the iron chaplet in her hand, it was difficult to tell. But there he was, dying certainly; a square-faced young man whose puttied legs sprawled across the Caen plinth. His cheese-cutter was rolling away, his rifle toppled; one hand lay limply across his Sam Browne, the other scrabbled up past the engraved names to the tantalising rewards so entirely beyond his reach. Was she mother or lover to him? Neither, perhaps. Just the dutiful female who awarded the prizes. It was hard to say. The soldier’s hat, Richard noticed, was neatly filling with snow and all the names on the north side of the memorial, the side he was passing, were whitened out.
After the War Memorial there was a suspicion of suburbs and then began the long valance of higgledy-piggledy fencing put up by an earlier Sir Paul to signify the nearness of Sheldon. The park proper, however, was still a mile or two away and after this there was the lengthy approach to the house itself. Behind the fence hummocks of rabbity blackberry bushes heaved the filched common-land up under its even sheet of snow like a flocky bed. Staring at it Richard thought that only sheer greed could have made a man enclose such a waste. A mile further the lane grew processional with oaks. The bicycle lamp fell across each tree like a knife. A gothic octagon popped up, too pretty for words. Then an arch. Richard grew vaguely fearful. That was how things always seemed to happen so far as he was concerned. One minute they were miles, months, whole situations away; the next they were upon him. Until the first lodge had come into view his journey still seemed to contain all the leisure in the world, now he was there. He bicycled under the arch into thick, soft delicate snow. A huge S stretched itself through shrubberies and lawns up to Sheldon itself. The bicycle ceased being clerical and just became louche and swung its beam inquisitively from end to end of the big blunt house. Richard, who had sustained a little fantasy of Sir Paul tucked away towards the rear of his inheritance writing in a lamp-lit library, was further troubled to see an entire row of glowing windows on the ground floor, fretted lanterns winking in the portico and, upstairs, figures passing and re-passing against pale yellow blinds. This was decidedly unlike a house that had been shut up for ten or more years. Where were the tea-chests stuffed with papers which he and Sir Paul had to sort?—because that was how he had seen it—a modest room crammed with letters and odd volumes, and with a make-do table at which Sir Paul would occasionally sit when what had occurred to him had to be written down. ‘Those letters from James,’ he would say to Richard, ‘you’d better leave those out if you don’t mind.’ Sir Paul would then turn his big ugly face aside (he was very like Miss Bellingham in the fantasy), and between them they would put the Rye correspondence in one heap and the Venetian letters in another. Suddenly the shrubbery ended and, rather than be seen trundling the bicycle up to the front door, he turned to the right, where there was a stone summer-house, into which the moon, the snow and the night simultaneously poured. Five of its eight walls had stucco medallions of Roman worthies fixed to them inside. Bays and lyres blistered up from the plaster with delicate aplomb. There was a strong, unpleasant smell of soot and decay and rotting plants. Mr Winsley’s bicycle sank gratefully against the wall below the deified Augustus and Richard hurried up to the house. Penchant, Sir Paul’s caretaker-cum-butler, gravely admitted him.
‘Sir Paul,’ said Penchant, opening the door again and shaking Richard’s damp coat against the night, ‘will be down directly, sir. He is finishing a letter.’
He lead the way across a rather gritty slate and marble floor. Over their heads, dust-sheets hung forward from tilted paintings. A suit of armour wore a bowler hat. There was a delicious warmth, which Richard realised would soon be for him, too warm; an almost blatant smell of food—pheasant, he thought it might be—and a more submerged pourri from which he managed to extract the individual breath of furniture oil, apple-lofts and hoarded linen. From an open door he heard the immoderate joy of caged birds. Quite near, but hidden, someone was typing with great efficiency. They entered the drawing-room and then it became plain at once why the house from outside had looked like the Duche
ss of Richmond’s ball. It was a high white room pierced on the garden side with a whole row of orangery-like windows. The park, seen through so many frames and sub-divided by so many bars, was like a painting by Winterhalter or Van der Meer in its various stages of completion, tentative and sketchy in the far window, where the bars were as thin and corrective as pencil lines; dreamily finished in the window nearest to him, as a broad oblong of light fell across the garden and lead the eye on to skeleton trees and a small bluish lake. A fire burnt at either end of the room. From a sugary wreath in the centre of the ceiling hung a huge grey cotton bag. A smaller chandelier at each side had been uncovered and lit. The fires spat and the flaring wood, still damp and muddy, as though it had just been dragged in from the park, gave out a smell of rough comfort curiously at odds with the insistent elegance of the surroundings.
A Treasonable Growth Page 19
