A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  Forsaken by Penchant, Richard began to look around him, tentatively at first and then deliberately, as if he were in a museum. As he passed from cabinet to cabinet, from picture to picture he saw that disorder had invaded the ledges and shelves and table tops with an almost locust thoroughness. A dusty avalanche of china, framed photographs, ebony and ivory animals, silver knick-knacks of all kinds, dirty tea-cups, gramophone needles, envelopes in jagged caches, ashtrays as bitter and sour as charnels, press-cuttings in crisply curling lengths of jaundiced newsprint, telegrams and bills impaled like Buddhist prayers on wiry spikes, a scattered packet of Terry’s chocolates and everywhere, books opened and turned face-downwards to keep the place. All this Richard took to be yet even greater proof that Sir Paul must be very much like his aunt, Miss Bellingham. He was thinking of this as he looked at a portrait of a prim, dark man not over-comfortably seated in a Georgian chair. The man, however, was modern and if a date might be guessed at, Richard thought about early nineteen-twenty-something. The artist, whoever it was, had evidently striven hard for distinction and had got it, but only distinction of a sartorial kind. Except for the rather livid fingers pressed together to make a pensive bridge and suggesting an extraordinary ability of some kind or other, the rest of the figure was formalised and remote. He stood back to get a better view and saw the sitter again at the far end of the room and framed this time by the moulding of a door.

  ‘Myself when young-ish by de Laszlo, I fear! Good evening—How do you do?’ Sir Paul began to cross the room. ‘What an awful night, really awful! I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if you had decided not to come and now that you have come I’ve kept you waiting unforgivably …’

  This Richard found somehow crushing.

  ‘But how did you get here?’ demanded Sir Paul, making the two or three mile journey sound quite a feat. ‘But a taxi, of course. You must allow me to include that in my duty as a host. Such a simply shocking night!’ He stooped forward. One hand advanced a little before his drooping, weary suit, its greeting delicate and full of considerations, in fact hardly a greeting at all. It was then that Richard saw in Sir Paul’s other hand, the pen with its cheap holder and wet glistening nib. Could it be that this almost fabulous literary creature still wished to impress? For a moment the pen absorbed and then emanated for him all the vulgarity of a barber’s pole. He just couldn’t believe Sir Paul had just left his writing-table—although the butler had so clearly stated that was where he was when Richard had arrived. It was so utterly incredible, like waiting for Marlowe—no, not Marlowe—like waiting for Henry James to settle the last tenuous thread upon the page before he emerged from his den at the top of the stairs to say, ‘Ah, my dear fellow … My dear fellow …’ Richard’s father had spoken like that, always careful to see that his affection was well and truly weighed down with the ballast of such phrases. But, Sir Paul … He must shut ears against the gate-crashing ghost of the Reverend John and his eyes against that blatant pen. He shook hands.

  ‘I bicycled.’

  He had expected some sort of amazement at this, but Sir Paul merely said, ‘How sensible of you. I shall bicycle in the spring. Doing it in the cold weather always brings on the most frightful neuralgia. Tell me, is your bicycle a B.S.A.?’

  ‘I really don’t know—I mean I didn’t notice. It isn’t my bicycle, it’s Mr Winsley’s.’

  But Sir Paul wasn’t listening. He was inserting his pen, nib uppermost, in a china vase with much the same care he might have brought to the operation had it concerned a flower. ‘There,’ he said, ‘and now for a drink.’ He paused at a well-endowed wine table and touched corks and glasses thoughtfully. ‘I’m giving you a gin—a gin and vermouth. That all right?’

  ‘Lovely—thanks.’

  ‘To happy days at Sheldon,’ said Sir Paul, privately satirical.

  ‘Sheldon.’

  ‘Now I must ask you to forgive me—only for a few minutes. I must tidy myself up. Suffolk hasn’t managed to enforce its routine as yet and I find myself constantly at odds with the hour. You will forgive me …? Help yourself you know.’ He waved his hand in a backwards motion towards the drinks and Richard noticed for the first time the narrow lozenge of ingrained ink all down the side of his second finger. There was also a glint of stubble on the pouching flesh which did not yet conceal the fine line of the jaw and the broad lapels of Sir Paul’s double-breasted suit sagged forward wearily and hinted at a long, unmuscular chest.

  He returned remarkably soon and remarkably changed like the advertisement for bath salts which says, ‘Aunt Gussie goes in, but the Lady Augusta Tantivy comes out.’ Richard had gone back to the portrait and, as one pores over a photograph in private with a shameless insistence that it gives up every fleshly secret, was bent forward to take in the competently sketched-in features, seeing them one at a time mercilessly, even clinically.

  ‘Titian,’ remarked Sir Paul, ‘could hardly have deserved greater homage …’

  Richard blushed and started back. He couldn’t have been more embarrassed if he had been discovered at a key-hole. Sir Paul had changed. Not his suit, although even the wrinkles in that had somehow reduced themselves. He was straighter, more lively. His eyes, made the smallest bit oblique by a listless crumpling of their lids, darted about with unapologetic amusement. Richard noticed the mouth. As in the portrait it betrayed the essential weakness in the face. There was a hint of feminine sweetness about it which in youth must have presented a somewhat equivocal attraction, but which now marked the calm of the fine sallow face like an indiscretion. Aware, as so many are, of a feature they would wish to be other than it is—not from any actual vanity, nor even because experience has long shown them its handicap—Sir Paul unconsciously and continually pressed and straightened his lips in a useless attempt to have them in a less perfect line.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to behave like a tourist.’

  ‘Why ever not? Surely there’s nobody worse than a person pretending not to see what they’re simply dying to see?’

  ‘It’s such a beautiful room …’

  ‘Then more’s the reason for looking at it. There’s … there’s a little Gainsborough. It’s over here …’

  ‘Oh yes. A friend of mine described it once.’

  ‘Really! How did he manage to see it?’

  ‘It was Miss Crawford—from Lafney, you know. She came here once and the housekeeper let her see this room. She——’

  ‘Crawford—I know the Crawfords, don’t I? From Lafney, did you say?’

  ‘Yes. He was Rear-Admiral Crawford.’

  ‘Dead?’ enquired Sir Paul bleakly.

  Richard nodded. ‘Ages ago. But Mrs Crawford and her daughter still live there and they have always been special friends of my family’s.’

  ‘At—at Lafney?’

  ‘My home is at Lafney.’

  Sir Paul lowered his head suddenly. He had been staring at the Gainsborough with a convulsed attention, yet with eyes which refused to assimilate the swirls of silvery white paint and record them coherently to his brain.

  ‘Of course it is,’ he said. ‘What am I thinking about! Here, let me give you a drink—let’s both have one—and then we must eat. You must be starving.’

  ‘It’s a splendid painting,’ said Richard as they moved away.

  ‘Yes it is. Splendid. Gainsborough probably charged a hundred and fifty for it, which is pretty reasonable when you come to think of it.’

  ‘For immortality——?’

  ‘Heavens no. For some sort of assurance; for certainty itself. There could be no doubt that you had your place in the scheme of things if you could see yourself like that. That’s what Gainsborough did. That was his power and his secret. He proved to the sitter himself that he existed—and all for a hundred and fifty pounds! What did your friend think of it?’

  ‘Oh she liked it immensely.’

  ‘She is an authority on the artist, perhaps?’

  ‘Lord, no!’

  ‘Well people do set
themselves up as such …’

  ‘Mary’s faults lie rather at the other extreme. She’s inclined not to be authoritative enough—about anything, I mean—and when she has a perfect right to be.’

  Sir Paul smiled; a wintry, fleeting ghost of a smile. ‘You must let me decide that when we meet,’ he said. ‘Come, didn’t I hear dinner!’

  Somewhere, in the garden it seemed, a bell was making a low, sodden noise, as though its clapper was made from a turnip. Dunk-dunk, dunkle-dunk. While they were proceeding from the big white drawing-room, leaving it, as it happened, just as Penchant was about to enter, thinking that they had not heard the bell, Richard made a hasty effort to map out a plan of what his attitude should be during the meal. In spite of the Gainsborough conversation his own uncertainty was increasing by leaps and bounds. In the first place, why was he at Sheldon at all? Wasn’t it likely to prove the finest trap that he had tumbled into so far? Copdock was a trap, but he had an eye on its workings and he wouldn’t be held down for long in that direction. But Sheldon … where would that lead …?

  At the dining-room door, Sir Paul stretched past him and turned the oval doorknob himself, but underlining the act with a pointed graciousness which suggested that such kindness might be for this occasion only. They sat at a large square old-fashioned table like the table d’hôte in a superior boarding house. The cloth hung down its sides like a pall. The silver glinted warily in the dull brown light.

  As they ate different aspects of the room began to interpret themselves. Now and then, Penchant, coming in by the far door which appeared to lead straight into the kitchen, would admit a long bar of harsh yellow light which would destroy all the warm subtleties of the endlessly carved Victorian furniture. Sir Paul ate nervously and without enthusiasm.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘Miss Crawford—she must be about thirty now?’

  It was on the tip of Richard’s tongue to give Mary’s age when the placing of the question struck him as curious. ‘Something like that,’ he admitted cautiously.

  Sir Paul said, ‘Of course I remember them quite well. Mrs Crawford dined here quite a bit when she was a girl. She married very young, you know. Crawford was away a good deal at first. She could have gone too, I suppose, if she had wanted. But she seemed to prefer England—they were never what you might call “devoted”.’

  ‘Mrs Crawford has mentioned that she used to come here.’

  Sir Paul ruminated. ‘There’s not much sense in your giving her my respects,’ he said after some consideration; ‘I don’t really know her. It was my father she came to see. In those days to inherit a house like this was like having to run a country club. Everybody used it to eat in and stay in it when they felt like it.’

  Penchant entered for about the dozenth time and lit a spirit stove in a silver dish and set it down on an elephantine sideboard. Its blue flame played coldly over three large tea-chests set one upon another in the corner, played too, as it happened, on part of Sir Paul’s history. These had not come from Sicily. They contained the evidence of what had preceded all that, thousands of press cuttings, six letters from Ronald Firbank and hundreds from practically everybody else. But most of all, photographs. There was the one, reading left to right, of Logan Pearsall Smith, Mr Paul Abbott and Diaghilev at Venice, a quite changed Sir Paul, with hair like paint and in tennis clothes, but with black socks. Diaghilev stood near, portentous, claiming, absurd. An ageing sugar-plum. There were simply hundreds of photographs. The most evocative always depicted people in trains all ready to move, usually leaning out and saying goodbye to Isadora Duncan at the Gare du Nord, to Michael Arlen at the Grand Central and to Lytton Strachey at Liverpool Street. Flicked over cinematically these faded, frozen attitudes might jerk into a record of those wild enjoyments which followed so hard on the heels of the Armistice. Flick—and there they would go—that merry jigging horde of young men miraculously left over from the holocaust; dancing, rushing for cabs or to the skeletal embraces of their broomstick women, making their ways up still well-swept steps and into still parlourmaided halls, tipping their boaters up and down like lids of neatly fitted mustard-pots and waving, waving, waving before they all disappeared with voiceless shrieks under the satanic Doric of Euston. Because the age had always insisted that they should be going somewhere. There was no time to rest. Whole novels seemed to have been written on these trains and quite amazing pictures painted in the waiting-room at Arles. This was what would confront Sir Paul when the tea-chests were opened, these lively ghosts of dinners eaten and lovers forgotten and journeys beginning and ending. Sir Paul had discovered the chests on his first day home—made a point of doing so. They were labelled, ‘Personal, 1921–26’. They were in what had been his mother’s bedroom and he had got Penchant to drag them downstairs.

  Richard, like most people attempting to understand a decade they were too young to have experienced could only see Sir Paul in his early days by what he had actually accomplished. To him the twenties were just a long line of book-titles which anecdotal interruptions from other people’s memoirs. He found it all vaguely intimidating. Behind all that, shielded from the beady-eyed biographer and the scholar’s scalpel, was the quintessential truth. He glanced across to his host to see if he might discover a fraction of it. Sir Paul was spooning away inside the near-hollow drum of Stilton on its blue, pedestalled dish.

  ‘There’s not much of it, but what there is is absolutely right. If you’ll pass your plate …’

  How hard he must have worked, thought Richard. How constantly. And yet never alone. He and his age had never claimed solitude, never seemed to need it. Their books and their paintings were interdependent, relying on some corporate strength in their efforts to create something fine among the ruin left by the generals. Their artistic manners may have been individual, but taken altogether they made a sturdy movement. The new faith had dated in almost less time than it had taken to create it. Here and there this colourful literary and artistic edifice, like a concrete cathedral, showed signs of questionable taste, though never in Sir Paul’s contributions to it. He alone, it seemed, had kept up the pace, expanding essay after essay, deploying his eccentric characters through novel after novel until his output was enormous and he succeeded in being in the literary world a very old-fashioned member of the avant-garde of two continents. The critics who had screamed with what they now insisted had been approval of what Sir Paul had written in the twenties, but which had then sounded very much like rage; now announced each new Abbott with grovelling care. It had been a near thing—almost as bad as the day Gide had turned down A la Recherche du Temps Perdu … It was Sir Paul’s fault, le style being so emphatically l’homme, that they had made the mistake of not taking him seriously. Winners weren’t generally such fancy beasts.

  ‘Now, about the work,’ Sir Paul said suddenly.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I fancy it isn’t going to be as interesting as you seem to imagine. A matter of sorting and that kind of thing. Do you feel that you would like to do this?’

  ‘It’s awfully decent of you to ask me.’

  ‘Well would you——?’

  ‘I think I would—very much.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Richard smiled uneasily. ‘Quite sure.’

  ‘And when could you come. When would be the best time?’

  ‘Sundays?’ hazarded Richard.

  ‘Sundays would do beautifully. Does that mean that you could manage every Sunday?’

  ‘I expect only every other one. We have a duty roster—church and meals and that sort of thing—which the masters have to share.’

  ‘Well never mind; every other Sunday then. You’d better come early and make a day of it—if you will be so kind, of course.’

  ‘Of course. I mean I should love to spend the whole day.’

  ‘Then that’s settled.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’ve been at Copdock some time I expect?’

  Richard shook his head. ‘No, I thought you
knew all about that. I’ve only just arrived, as a matter of fact. This is my first term.’

  Sir Paul drew in his lower lip and bit down on it. ‘I see, I see.’ he nodded judiciously; ‘I expect Aunt Fred forgot to mention it. I hope you like Aunt Fred?’

  ‘Miss Bellingham? Oh she’s been awfully kind I like her very much.’

  ‘I bet she adores you.’

  Startled, Richard looked up thinking to find Sir Paul either regarding him with amusement, or indicating that the remark possessed inverted commas of some kind. But he was pursuing Stilton crumbs across his plate with a fruit knife.

  ‘You have always wanted to be a schoolmaster I suppose?’

  Unwilling to go into ‘all that’ at the moment Richard just said, ‘I suppose I have.’

  ‘It seems to me a very unhealthy life, if you don’t mind my saying so. All that blackboard dust, who is to say that it doesn’t produce some academic kind of silicosis?’

  Richard laughed. ‘Oh really! I hadn’t thought of that. No, if there are what they call ‘occupational risks’ they are far more likely to lie in some maintained kind of mental immaturity.’

  ‘So Aunt Fred’s mentally immature!’ Sir Paul scrunched his napkin together and dabbed it at the corners of his mouth.