A Treasonable Growth

by Dr Ronald Blythe

  ‘Yet one envies Bateson,’ he heard himself saying, ‘—all the Batesons.’

  ‘One does at first, but one ceases to.’

  ‘I still do I’m afraid.’

  ‘Of course. At your age it would be strange if you didn’t. Don’t worry, it’s one of the more circumspect jealousies. A more intelligent society than our own used openly to encourage it, though never at the expense of the so-called intellectual. That is where we go wrong, of course. We divide our society into two sneering camps, the one all bombast, and other all barbs. There, why should I lecture you! You know all this as well as I do!’

  ‘There’s always my proper work,’ said Richard incautiously.

  ‘Your proper work?’

  He plunged. ‘My writing——’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sir Paul with fearful tolerance, ‘your book. Of course, I should have asked you about that before.’

  ‘But … but I’ve never even mentioned it.’

  ‘You didn’t have to, did you?’

  ‘I’m as transparent as all that?’

  ‘Not transparent—wherever did you get that idea! I don’t see through you, but into you. It’s a small privilege one’s allowed after sitting thirty years at a desk in front of reams of achingly empty paper. I can see, like all young men, you fancy yourself a brand-new contribution to the world’s types. Well, just thank God you’re not. Believe me, it’s always a comfort to know that there are a few more about like oneself—however odd. Call it cowardly if you like.’

  ‘I don’t call it cowardly and as a matter of fact I had never thought of myself as exceptional; not in that way at least.’ The spirit of truthfulness, having descended that far, he felt obliged to say that he hadn’t even begun his book, not one single sentence of it. ‘But I expect you know that, too.’

  ‘Don’t make me clairvoyant, my dear. I do suspect that you haven’t, as I only suspect you to be a writer. Being the type and being the thing are very different matters. Besides, there’s something else I suspect’—he permitted a mothlike malice to flutter across the tea-things—‘You mayn’t have the energy.’

  ‘That’s possible,’ Richard agreed humbly.

  ‘It’s a matter of habit like everything else,’ said Sir Paul, immediately regretting his tartness. ‘You do that instead of something else each day and it adds up. A novel is three hours in the morning from September till March. Or from April till October. It all depends on whether you swim.’

  ‘You’re certainly making it sound ridiculously easy.’

  Sir Paul, who was expecting a compliment and had automatically decided upon his answer to it, looked put-out for a second or two. Richard was making him faintly anxious. He veered so. He had been positively deferential in the library, well he didn’t want that, but he found its reverse—this defensive abruptness—equally expendable. ‘Am I …?’ he murmured in a complaining, abstract voice, ‘—the easiest thing in the world …’

  In the stonelike silence which followed, Sir Paul munched away nimbly at the bread and butter. Mrs Penchant came in and filled up the teapot. Her bulging, seemingly impossible roundness made her look like Mrs Noah. She was propelled across the floor in her flat, single-strap shoes so professionally smiling and pleasant one could tell it didn’t mean a thing.

  ‘I think perhaps I ought to be going.’ Richard confessed.

  Mrs Penchant, carrying the kettle, went out.

  At once Sir Paul leapt up and said, ‘Did you notice surely you must have; she’s as pleased as punch. Why?’

  ‘I don’t suppose she has much to worry about.’

  ‘But to be as deliriously joyful as that, day in and day out! Honestly, between the two of them it’s like living in a bin.’

  Privately Richard couldn’t agree. In fact he had felt positively grateful for Mrs Penchant’s tabby-cat presence at that moment.

  ‘The trouble with all English servants,’ Sir Paul was saying, ‘is that they have no style. Oh, they had—I’m not saying against what things used to be like. But now they try and impose their own kind of horrible cosiness on everything. Do you know what I heard that woman saying to her husband the other day? She was doing the drawing-room and she said, ‘I don’t think I shall ever get this room snug’. Snug! You should see the Sicilians when you employ them. Why they behave as if they had inherited the rooms, and in a way they have. They’d never refer to one’s possessions as ‘his old things’—as the Penchant woman did the other day.’

  Richard laughed. ‘Some people might think you blest, being surrounded by honesty and cheerfulness.’

  ‘You’re very critical of me, aren’t you, Richard?’

  This was so alarming—his appearing critical and of Sir Paul Abbott of all people—that Richard got up and declared, ‘Believe me, I’m not; I’m … anything but that. If I’m anything at the moment, I’m bewildered. Oh, not by you,’ he added hurriedly. This situation lurched dangerously and then recovered itself. Just then, thin, ravaged, un-gay and etiolated, a forlorn strand of dance music made its surprising entry. Somewhere in the heart of Sheldon a gramophone was playing. They both laughed, it was so entirely unexpected and Sir Paul shook an amused head.

  ‘Snake-hips Johnson,’ he said. ‘How do I know? Mrs Penchant has a passion for him, believe it or not, and—well, there you are?’

  So it was to saxophones that they parted and Richard pedalled wearily back to the school along the rime-dark road.

  12

  THAT should have been the end of the day. It was past seven when Richard wheeled his bicycle into the gardener’s shed and impaled it on a stack of other decrepit machines. He thought vaguely of spreading the eiderdown from his bed on the rug in front of the gasfire and himself on top of it. He thought, I could write a story; a poem. The uncommitted evening sprawled in front of him comfortingly, soothingly; he was excited by its sheer vacuity. It seemed ages since he had had a few hours entirely to himself. He ought to write letters, not poems. He owed Mary one, perhaps two. He couldn’t be sure she herself wrote with less duty and more affection. He could, and ought, to write to his mother. She had a day for letters herself and it was the regularity of her cosy little descriptions which gave more pleasure to Richard and Quentin than the descriptions themselves. But then he wouldn’t write letters. He wouldn’t do anything. He’d actually spread the eiderdown over the skimpy hearthrug and was seated on it, taking off his shoes, when Bateson burst in.

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ he said, ‘you’re licking your wounds? High society’s been too much for you?’

  ‘I suppose you never do this. You wouldn’t have to, anyway. Your armchair happens to have springs.’

  ‘I came to drag you out.’

  ‘What——?’

  ‘Only for an hour or so.’

  ‘But I’ve just decided to be in—very much in as a matter of fact. Sorry and all that.’

  ‘You couldn’t have,’ Bateson declared dubiously. ‘You know you won’t be setting a foot outside this dump till Friday at the very least. It’s your tables week—or perhaps you didn’t know? Actually the Winner only plastered up his little notice about an hour ago.’

  ‘He did ask me,’ Richard said. ‘Awfully sorry Bateson old boy and all that, but honestly, insane as it might seem to you, I’d sooner stay where I am.’

  ‘You won’t get a drink till Friday,’ said Bateson warningly.

  ‘I don’t want a drink till Friday.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ Bateson sighed. He then assumed an attitude of classical despair; his eyes and his eyebrows drooped at their ends and he wagged his head from side to side. ‘Do you know what you are, boy? You’re a Winner, a little budding, embryo Winner.’ He shrugged. ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it. I did,’ he added rather forlornly, ‘rather look forward to a can in your esteemed company.’

  ‘Blast,’ Richard searched around for his discarded shoes. Dulled and sodden with slush, they were an added and most eloquent reason for his not turning out again. ‘Where was it you thought of going?’ />
  ‘Have you ever heard of “The Case is Altered”?’ Bateson enquired with great casualness.

  ‘A pub?’

  Bateson groaned. ‘A pub—Oh, my God! If you go on like that you’ll be having the law on them for serving you. Of course it’s a pub.’

  ‘Not—not at Stokely?’

  ‘Yes, at Stokely.’

  ‘But it’s miles——’

  ‘It’s just two miles. How did you know it was at Stokely anyway? Have you been there before?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Then how did you know?’ Bateson was oddly persistent.

  ‘I suppose it’s a trick of remembering villages by their pubs and churches. Quenny, my elder brother and I used to spend most of the summer holidays on brass-rubbing expeditions when we were so high.’

  ‘That explains it,’ said Bateson. ‘Poor fellow, you’ve had the most ghastly childhood. Buck up with those shoes. I tell you, you’re going to be bloody grateful to me one day. Now your coat!’ He began to hum a little tune. Now and then he stopped to say, ‘Poor old fellow … Poor old Dicky Brand …!’ and, ‘Brass-rubbings—did you ever hear the bloody like … Christmas!’

  ‘There’s no need to be that pleased with yourself.’ Struggling back into his coat and scarf, which still had an unpleasant warm dampness about them, reminded Richard that it was barely twenty minutes since he had taken them off. But he was pleased all the same. Pleased like a fifth-former with having pleased Bateson. Now that he had made the effort he was bound to admit that curling up in front of a row of gargling gas-mantels was a particularly feeble way to spend the evening, all the more since, as Bateson had reminded him, it would be quite a long time before he was free to go out again as he liked. Mr Winsley preferred to arrange people’s duties in large slabs, rather like the nursing shifts in hospitals or guards in the Army. ‘Tables’ meant one could say goodbye to any social activity for a week at least. Only Bateson contrived to remain unencumbered with such fetters. His position as coach made it difficult to nail him down to a rigorous timetable. It also placed him outside the actual surveillance of Mr Winsley who had learnt, over forty years, to take it on trust that the robust sequence of puzzlingly slangy, square-shouldered, stiff-chinned young men he had engaged in this capacity, did really instruct in the philosophy and technique of cricket and rugby football. Bateson, as it happened, was not only conscientious in his teaching, but successful in the result. He did it all effortlessly and squandered his very considerable energies in oddly futile pursuits, in loveless encounters and far-from-merry binges, from both of which he returned childishly unscathed both in appearance and mind.

  ‘And there’s something else you ought to know—I’m broke—or pretty nearly.’

  ‘It’s not a night club we’re going to,’

  ‘It’ll be an extravagance for me if it’s just beer and biscuits.’

  ‘Well then, don’t come,’ Bateson said though not before making sure that he wasn’t taking any risks by appearing so casual.

  ‘How you can expect me to disappoint you when you’re looking as about as pathetic as a St Bernard that hasn’t been let out for a week, I don’t know.’

  But Bateson was dancing lightly round the skimpy furniture. His arms sheltered and guided an invisible girl. He sang:

  ‘When a Broadway baby says, “Goodnight”,

  It’s early in the morning.

  Manhattan babies don’t sleep tight

  Till day is daw-aw-ning …’

  ‘If we’re like this before we even get to Stokely …’

  Bateson swooped to a standstill. His hand remained outstretched cupping the small of a phantom back. ‘The trouble with you—Dick—Don’t mind me calling you that, do you?—No, what was I saying; the trouble with you …’

  ‘No,’ insisted Richard loudly. ‘Don’t say it. Just shut up, there’s a good chap. Why the hell I’m so obvious a supplicant for this world’s good advice, God only knows. But I am. Everybody turns to me when they want to get rid of a little—why?’

  ‘I could tell you,’ said Bateson flatly.

  ‘After Stokely?’

  ‘Perhaps you won’t be in so great need of it then.’

  ‘How sibylline you’re being tonight, Bateson.’

  Bateson was about to defend himself from any accusation of profundity when his eye happened to see the Reverend John Brand’s half-hunter lying on the dressing-table among a welter of soiled collars, loose change and curling, unframed photographs.

  ‘That’s not the time—?’

  ‘It is; to the second.’

  ‘Well hurry, man. You do want to go, don’t you? only we musn’t expect too much,’ he added. ‘Then we shan’t be disappointed—isn’t that what they say?’

  ‘I’m not expecting anything, unless it’s cold feet.’

  Bateson, who had reached the door and was holding it open looked round suddenly. He didn’t speak, but as Richard stuffed a scarf inside his coat and kicked the gas-tap off, an unusual percipience took the place of the customary aggressive charm in his face. Then the percipience died, lacking, perhaps, the kind of energy needed to keep such a thing viable. He was Bateson once more. But for a single moment he had been about to interpret a quality (or defect) in the character of another person which, had such visions become a habit, could have put some very substantial thought in the too-airy spaces of his understanding. The moment passed. The gas fire went out like a lion. Richard started; it was a noise he found particularly detestable. Then they walked slowly out of the School into the Sunday streets. High above their heads Miss Bellingham’s room watched the night, its gaze wily, oily and yellow. With maddening regularity, a shutter whacked the wall. It was freezing fast. Each step they took broke through a layer of soiled, crisp snow, the colour of damp brown sugar. Flakes still fell thinly, but so vacant and sparse in effect that they were less like winter than like smuts blowing up from a half-dowsed wood fire. Breath unfurled from between their teeth in ectoplasm strips. Bateson continued to hum when he wasn’t cursing the fact that his foot had once again sunk more deeply and damply into the meringue-like gutter and discovered water.

  ‘Did you take Church Duty?’ Richard asked.—‘I expect so.’

  ‘Everybody went, everybody, that is, except the Winner. Incidentally, have you seen what they’re doing to the old place?’

  ‘What, the church?’

  ‘They’re sandbagging it.’

  Richard recalled later the extraordinarily momentous effect this simple scrap of information had had on him. The knell of an age which is slipping away sounded so subtly and so variously that most people never hear it. It isn’t until they are well on into the later experience that they can see part of their own endurance walled-off by time and events and never again to be approached except through history itself. When Bateson said, ‘They’re sandbagging it’ Richard felt that the foundations of a barrier were being laid which was to keep him out forever from the life that had been his until that moment. It was tragic and yet it was exhilarating. He was appalled and yet made gay at the same instant. He supposed that even the most slavish traditionalist has his moments of perverse joy when all the vestiges of what he has spent a lifetime believing in are obliterated by some mighty leap in the world’s progression (or retrogression). The thrill that something has ‘gone’ sometimes comes before the misery of knowing that one will never see it again. There is nothing so dazzling as the idea of revolution, nor any happiness so brief and questionable as that which follows one.

  ‘Think of it,’ went on Bateson complacently, ‘all those trimmings from the good old horse-and-cart days being tidied away before the showdown! I wonder what the poor old Belle makes of it all. Not much I shouldn’t wonder. They’re going to take most of the stained-glass out of those narrow windows in the choir—it appears it’s pretty classy stuff, though I must say I’ve never seen anyone looking at it. Old Lord Stick-in-the-mud too—the johnny with the toga—well they’re making him nice and cosy too.’
r />   ‘The Debenham memorial?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘You’ve not heard anything more about joining-up I suppose?’

  ‘Nope.’

  As they walked, the swift, sweet and undeniable fact occurred to Richard that he would like to get drunk. What had been farthest from his thoughts an hour ago, now overpowered them to the reckless exclusion of everything else. Was it the same with Bateson, he wondered? But Bateson was jogging on quietly with nothing to show how he felt, one way or the other. Also, like so many sportsmen, he was finding a long walk curiously fatiguing. The magnificent resilience which made him a legend on the playing-field deserted him on a longish stretch of road.

  ‘Roll on “The Case”,’ he complained.

  It was rather a snivelling little place set a few feet back from the slushy road when they did at last get to it. Two trestles and four sagging forms left outside in the night were covered with fat white bolsters of snow. The bar was packed and seemed the more amazingly so because no hint of its raucous gaiety leaked out into the surrounding no-man’s-land of beet fields and shivering sloe thickets. They pressed their way through the fudge of dubious jollity. The noise was incessant. Men were laughing and boasting and shouting and every now and then, like the cheer-leader of a Sapphic contingent, the enormous landlady would drag her brown satin bosom up from where it appeared to be resting on the brightly polished counter, and bring up a whole supporting passion of shrill female mirth by letting out a great whoop of her own unfettered enjoyment. Behind the fat woman a little thin man leapt about doing all the work. Four barrels lay on their sides on a hearse-like structure and he fled from one to the other of these with pots and glasses and imprecations. He worked against a background of fairylights, silver doilies and fretted mahogany. It seemed quite pointless to try and get a drink. In the uproar they’d never be able to speak to each other. Something told Richard that he’d never want to drink enough of the contents of the seeping, lachrymose barrels to get the effect he had earlier longed for. He even doubted if beer could produce such an effect anyway. In fact he was all for getting out of the place.