‘You wouldn’t tell her?’
‘I can’t be sure that I won’t—I gave up those sort of promises ages ago.’
‘Oh, please—but you wouldn’t? Anyway, I wasn’t thinking of Miss Bellingham.’
‘Old Winsley, perhaps?’ asked Sir Paul.
‘Well … perhaps …’
‘Aunt Fred won’t love you any more for fastening such limitations on him.’
‘I did know—I’d gathered that they were once great friends.’
Sir Paul stood up letting his napkin slide slowly down the length of his suit, ‘Great friends! God God, they were lovers, my dear. Indecency wasn’t in it! They were the Abelard and Heloise of East Suffolk. You’ll never believe it, but old Winsley used to look exactly like the Prince of Wales when he was—let me see—about your age, I suppose. How old are you—twenty-two—three? Well, about that. And he’d really done most awfully well at Oxford. It was an absolute foxer why he’d ever dreamt of going to Copdock in the first place. I mean it was just another of those high-principled, low-geared establishments which were springing up everywhere at the time to—to cash in on the current snobberies. Winsley should have taken orders and then tried a place like Repton. He might have been a bishop by now—who knows!’
‘He applied for the position in the normal way?’
‘What—?’
‘I mean he didn’t meet Miss Bellingham in some social capacity and come to the school in that way?’
Sir Paul let Richard open the door for him and said in a chilly voice without turning round, ‘Really, you can hardly expect me to be word-perfect on these legends when I was only a child at the time …’
Ghastly old gossip! thought Richard furiously. Who had started it anyway!
Leading the way, Sir Paul passed to the opposite side of the staircase and pushed against two tall rosewood doors which parted with a small click. They led into the library. It was icy. The tumbled, half-dismantled dust-sheets showing a fat table-leg here, a gaping bookcase there, made it look like the setting of some recent rape. The bookcases were at right-angles with the wall and each one terminated in a small marble bust. The windows were filled with late Victorian library glass which made gloomy jig-saw patterns against the night. There was a smell of damp stationery.
‘I thought we might work in here,’ said Sir Paul more equably and, sensing Richard’s involuntary shudder, added, ‘We’ll warm it up, of course.’
After this they returned to the drawing-room. It was half-past nine. There was a dogged feeling of conclusiveness. When Richard mentioned going, Sir Paul didn’t say, ‘not yet’ or any of those polite things. Merely that so far as he was concerned, the arrangements they had come to appeared perfect. He hoped that they appeared the same to Richard. He became so kind that Richard regretted his own recent ill-humour and began to search around in his mind for something to redeem it. The opportunity came in the guise of The Times Literary Supplement spread open at an article entitled, ‘Abbottiana: Some further incursions into the Kingdom of Wonder.’ It could only be about Sir Paul’s last book of essays. He said, hoping it would not seem too apparently respectful, ‘I’m longing to get hold of a copy of The Peach Orchards of Iken.’ It was a mistake. He knew it the moment he had said it. Sir Paul turned swiftly and stared at him with undisguised irritation. Richard thought, Oh God: I’ve as good as asked him to present me with a copy … Why couldn’t he have said that he had just ordered it from the library or from Smith’s? It wouldn’t have been exactly truthful, of course. But neither was his saying that he ‘longed’ to read the thing. He wouldn’t mind reading it. But that was a very different matter. Well, he’d said it and that was that. He returned Sir Paul’s stare helplessly.
Sir Paul’s reaction was curious. He appeared to be gathering himself for a leap or a drill movement. His hands fell to his sides and swung there awkwardly and a film like a secondary lid slid warily across his eyes like a transparent protection through which he might take the measure of an enemy without injuring his own percipience. It was a famous glance, though Richard wasn’t to know that. It had put Frank Harris in his place and toppled Arnold Bennett, on occasion, from his. Above all, it wasn’t an act. The chameleon, the stick-insect, the hedgehog, the zebra and the electric eel each have their own barricade of one sort or another against the critics of their existence and Sir Paul had his. Life had not needed to prove to him that he was to be included among the pursued, he had accepted such a fate from the very start. The difference between his mind and most men’s was the difference between a seismometer and a weathervane. He was alerted to the least lasting, most evanescent hint of trouble, whereas the majority of the human race never give it a thought until it twizzles them round. In society generally he had always preferred, and himself maintained, a mannered approach towards the naturally gregarious, and grew instantly wretched and apprehensive at smart parties if the formalised farce broke down under drink or horseplay. When the screaming began, Sir Paul was among the first to hurry away. This had increased the legend of his politeness—small compensation, as it happened, since he would frequently have given his soul (had his nerves only allowed it) to have heard what was being screamed. Was it just his fancy, or was there some kind of mockery in the air now? Could he detect its buttery smell? Richard’s bewilderment reassured him. It had only been clumsiness. Sir Paul had never been slow to forgive that, indeed, in the young he found it a somewhat endearing trait. Being as suave as muscat himself he had always envied a little awkwardness in others.
‘How kind of you to say so,’ he replied. ‘You must let me get you the book. No, no—please …’ He retired from the room with all the dignity of a reinstated dean.
Richard at once began to walk about and seize upon various objects as though these contacts, by their reality, could obliterate for him the memory of his hazy faux pas. Put my bloody foot right into it, he admitted to the diaphanous Gainsborough lady. She returned his living gaze with one of sloe-eyed detachment. Unhelped by utter indifference, which is the prerogative of the inanimate, Richard returned to the sofa and picked up The Times. He found the personal column. Nothing like other people’s discomfiture to make you forget your own. ‘Lady of title wishes to dispose of beautiful Manchurian squirrel coat,’ he read and ‘Grateful thanks to St Juan of Redondela for favours received.’ And then, set between these two and with the perfect urbanity of the terrified, ‘Viennese lady, excellent cook … housemaid … anything—seeks position in England. Apply 177, Strasbourgstrasse, 2, Wien.’ Further down, set between a cigarette advertisement and a plea for individual chalices at Holy Communion, was another similar cry for help. ‘Young Austrian Jew, 24, Graduate; can drive, can garden … apply at once 134. Hoffmannplatz, Salzburg …’ Suddenly nothing seemed to matter. Sir Paul, who had arrived at the same conclusion, but by other methods and a good many years before, returned to discover Richard kicking abstractedly against a firedog with yesterday’s edition of The Times straggling limply from one hand. Not associating the newspaper with the attitude he was touched by this downcast state and blamed himself for being so quick to take offence. He held out The Peach Orchards of Iken. Then with hasty second thoughts, he hurried to one of the muddly Pembroke tables and wrote, standing up, ‘Richard Brand. With kind wishes, Paul Abbott, 30th January, 1939.’
‘There. Well it’s next Sunday then?’
‘It really is most terribly kind of you …’
‘Rubbish. Ten o’clock—did we fix the time?’
‘Yes, ten.’
In the park the fine, though persistent snow had brought about the acute forlornness of deep winter. It had filled up the classical amphorae on the terrace and was spattered primly across the loins of a much-weathered muse. It melted against Sir Paul’s face as he watched the bicycle lamp nidder-nodder from tree to tree the whole length of the drive. It would be snowing in London, he thought, and in Warsaw (he had never really enjoyed Warsaw), in beautiful Berchtesgaden and in the Place Vendôme. Or so the London Regio
nal announcer had implied at six. He found it moving to think of Europe’s passive whiteness, all the capitals and streets and squares mutely enduring the glacial cold. He walked slowly along the whole front of Sheldon. The snow drifting against the back of his head felt like an approaching helmet. I’m getting on, he decided, not without satisfaction. They had better start with getting all that Tullingham stuff in order. He might give it to the FitzWilliam. A sudden wind whirled the landscape up into a blinding chiaroscuro. Sir Paul hurried in.
11
BUT instead of sorting the Tullingham papers on the first Sunday, they put the library straight. This, it soon proved, was essential if they wanted to work to any system. Daunting to begin with, both Richard and Sir Paul found the clearing and dusting and then re-establishing of each smooth shelf wonderfully satisfying. The middle of the floor grew mountainous with odd volumes. Sir Paul wore for his task a baize apron borrowed from Penchant and a lemon-coloured scarf tucked inside a cricket shirt. His hands trembled under the wobbling piles of books which Richard handed down to him. For the first hour or so, neither of them spoke, except about the job itself. Richard, who had removed his jacket, toiled too precisely to be really at ease.
‘I still haven’t come across volume three of the little Hudibras, Brand. Let me know if you see it.’
‘Oh I have—I mean it’s here with the others. I found it a few minutes ago.’ And then, because he suspected that it was this paucity of conversation which was to blame for the slightly congealed atmosphere, he added, ‘Miss Bellingham reads Hudibras—or so she said.
‘That’s about the most unlikely thing I ever heard!—But what odd subjects you go in for—you and she!’
‘Books, are they odd?’
But Sir Paul had made up his mind to be amused. ‘This is a new light on Aunt Fred! She reads Hudibras in her antiquity. And what’s more, she chooses to talk about it with charming young men. I’m afraid we’ve all—the family, that is—have always thought of her as rather a wicked old darling.’
Richard stayed silent.
‘Well?’ demanded Sir Paul. ‘Haven’t you at times?’
‘I feel I shouldn’t talk about her.’
‘That is polite, certainly. It might even be kind. But I shall talk about her and unless you enjoy monologues you had better join in. You are a bit too polite, you know.’
Polite … is that what it is? Richard wondered.
‘I am——?’
‘Oh, you mustn’t apologise for it. It’s just the least bit indefinite, that’s all’ Richard felt a glance from the heavy-lidded eyes somewhere about his turn-ups. He shuffled uneasily on the library steps and Sir Paul continued; ‘What I really meant is that your sort of politeness can let one out of all kinds of commitments, and in the long run one is bound to be committed to something, don’t you think?—You don’t. I can see that. Never mind; you will.’
At that moment a shower of odds and ends fell from a book Richard was holding and Sir Paul said eagerly,
‘Is that Praeterita? Yes, it is—the one Eddie gave me.’ He was all at once in the very highest spirits. ‘I almost took the house to pieces to find this once. It’s been lost for years. What a find! And all his poor letters all over the floor … My dear boy, what a mess! I shan’t feel any dustier when they scatter my ashes on the front steps of Baalbec … But it was worth it!’
Encouraged by such cheerfulness Richard asked, ‘Are your books in this room? … I suppose not …’ And Sir Paul said, straightening himself up for a moment, so that Penchant’s apron slipped sideways on his narrow body, ‘No,’ quite sharply, but supplemented this by adding, ‘Does Aunt Fred still buy me, do you know? She used to be frightfully loyal.’
‘I don’t know, it’s difficult to tell. Her room is so filled with books. She’s got the one about Assam. It’s on the telephone shelf along with all the directories and timetables and things.’
‘Really? How splendidly ridiculous she is! I haven’t been to see her yet, which is rather awful. You’d better say that I am on my way should she say anything. I’m afraid she’s bound to if I don’t manage a call during the next week or so.’
They moved over to the central bookcase. Each shelf of it had a little scalloped fringe of gold-embossed leather. Richard climbed the steps again and took down the books, handing them in twos and threes to Sir Paul, who in turn stacked them in precarious stalagmites on the floor. The contents of this case were made intriguing by the number of errant slips and sheets of august looking writing paper with which they appeared to be crammed. He longed to investigate some of the letters. Aware of this temptation, Sir Paul said,
‘They do look rather fun, don’t they? But they’re not, unfortunately—unless you find people like Round and Clodd and Thomas Huxley up your particular street. I’ve been through them all most carefully hoping against hope to discover a scrap of something or other headed ‘Brasenose, 1880’, but it would seem …’ a small lurching laugh heralded a pun, ‘that—that father had never heard of P-Pater …’ Then he put down his duster, smoothed the sides of his head in a slow gesture of weariness from two stiffly-spread palms and gazing fixedly out into the frigid morning, said,
‘I was conceived when my father was seventy—I state the fact, no more. But the result remains that I have never been able to consider myself as anything more than a defiant gesture in the face of Time. It is most extraordinarily interesting when you came to think of it, because what is there to be hoped of a man whose grandfather once dined with Talleyrand? Or if you like, what not hoped of him …?’
The extraordinary fact took possession of him as it had done so often in the past. He forgot Richard, forgot the very existence of speech itself and when he continued it was as if he was engaged upon one of his celebratedly tenuous essays.
‘I mean the staggering fantasy existing in the reality must—must make p-puny all subsequent invention—you agree with me, surely … yes?’
‘You mean that a fact from the past can have determined what you—what a man is?’
‘That’s a nasty text-booky way of putting it,’ said Sir Paul irritably. ‘No, I don’t mean that at all. Not the fact—if you understand me—but the knowing of it! Look at Montesquieu; if he hadn’t been told of his being descended from the earliest kings of France he would have been a—I was going to say, a dear—but he would have been something more than that. He might have been a real poet. As it was, and as we know, he ended up by being just good copy. I’m always terribly amused, aren’t you, when biographers let themselves go on what they call the ‘original’ of some fictitious person and speak of them as being ‘immortalised’, when, in fact, their mortality is only too miserably stressed—as indeed it must be when it’s imprisoned forever in a g-ghastly galantine of paragraphs!’
With his own head on a level with a very dusty one of Seneca, Richard peered down at Sir Paul as he talked and stalked. Montesquieu … Eddie … Who the hell were they? It was no use pretending. Now if Quentin were here … But Sir Paul was explaining, courteously, if relentlessly. It appeared to be part of his rôle in life to interpret the world to the young. The clock chimed one before he had finished and like an extension of its accuracy, Penchant entered with drinks on a tray, and following the drinks, with luncheon on a trolley.
The meal was distinctly disappointing for such a cheerless day. Some soup in a silver tureen, rolls, fruit—apples, pears and a partly despatched melon—cold meat and a sort of tepid salad comprising a confusion of beetroot and diced potato; not any of it very attractive. Penchant served it with detachment. He had left the door open and it was no secret that he and Mrs Penchant were having a roast and possibly treacle tart.
Sir Paul dragged his palms against his temples and said, ‘I thought that if we had our meal in here we would find it easier to go straight on with the work.’ But he had lived in Sicily too long to rough it absolutely. ‘Penchant!’ he called out to the butler, who was gently beetling away, ‘Penchant, there’s bread, that’s right; fruit
, meat, which is what I said, but that isn’t all is it? What else would occur to you, Penchant …? Your mouth being as full of dust as mine and, er, Mr Brand’s are?’
‘You could have a hock, Sir Paul, a nice decent hock. Or there’s a burgundy, only that will mean waiting a few minutes while it goes in the kitchen fender …’
Penchant lacked enthusiasm. A meal like this threw him out more than an elaborately arranged table. He stood waiting at the door, too waxen and particular by far. He had lost all his hair at a very early age and the effect was noble in the extreme. This patrician accident was ruined rather by his voice, which was thin and whiney and E.C.4. Sir Paul’s long absence abroad had been the ruin of Penchant. He had found himself the master of Sheldon for twelve whole years and during all that long time he had never left it. He had reigned supreme over his dust-sheeted empire, forwarding letters, polishing things and then covering them up, bossing the two other servants and his wife. He had grown to believe that it would never be otherwise and had had ample excuse for doing so. Sir Paul’s homecoming had affected him like a sort of millennium—something which presumably had to happen, yet could not be credited until it had.
‘Burgundy, Penchant, that’s the very thing.’
‘Very good, Sir Paul.’
When it came and Penchant had managed to inject some note of finality in the way in which he closed the door, Sir Paul said very quietly, ‘To this meeting, Richard.’ He was flung back across, rather than sitting in, a revolving chair, with his long legs splayed out over the dirty carpet. The wine shook a little in his hand. ‘I have a certainty that all this has been done before.’ He indicated the library with a wave of his crested fork. ‘It’s the putting of one’s house in order before the barbarians arrive. I can imagine similar scenes at Uriconium, at Camulodunum, at Rome itself and at Carthage; men touching their books for the last time … It’s too, too terribly sad …’ He sighed heavily. ‘You must tell me if you feel it otherwise than this. You are young and you hope to be a writer, do you not? But there are some—and you may be among them—to whom even a war is preferable to their own particular kind of boredom.’
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