Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  Why else, he thought, would he bring me down here if I embarrass him so? Why all this talk about the housekeeper, this exquisite pain in his father’s judgement of me, his need to impress and humble me simultaneously?

  A series of incidents came to his mind, previously innocent but now instinct with guilt and complexity. Personal remarks about his appearance—“Or course, you’re so fantastically slender, John”; evenings with the guitar and a precious wine from home in Palgrave’s pink room. Swift glances exchanged between older members of the Ranelagh Club when they came in to dine à deux; and most incriminating of all, Palgrave’s actionless pleasure in women; a concession he made to John and the others, no doubt, a game in which he was self-trained to indulge as with the nonsense of shooting and horses.

  But he did go in the end; telling John with sudden softness, as though he were now regretful of his earlier acerbity, that he’d set his tie for him if he had difficulty, that if he wanted an “exquisitely scented bath salt” he’d leave one of his own cubes for him in the nearest bathroom.

  The bed had been turned down, an inviting diagonal of sheet across the flowered eiderdown. A new fire smouldered in the blackleaded Balmoral grate, and on the washstand a polished ewer steamed brassily into its canopy of folded towels.

  John washed and dressed quickly. The room now filled him with unease. Even his things had been unpacked by unseen hands, his too-small dinner jacket with the stained lapels laid out on the bed, his razor and toothbrush placed side by side on the pink marble of the washstand. He felt himself to be the heroine in the fairy story who discovers a mansion in the woods in which every comfort and delicacy is provided by invisible servants. Having eaten and drunk she ascends the ancient stair to a chamber such as this only to be ravished in the night by an unseen prince of such hideous aspect that until she has given him her love he must remain for ever a creature of the dark.

  Imaginings of this sort made him creep with distaste; he longed to return at once to Dublin, to do or say something outrageous at dinner, even to seek out Claire Maunde’s bedroom and prove to the father, the Captain, and his housekeeper, the hidden judges of his soul, that his intentions had always been honourable.

  As it was, he crept across the landing and went softly down the stairs to find the hall empty. The fire had been refuelled with boughs and turf, a dumbwaiter had been drawn to one side of the fender and on it decanters shone dully in the firelight.

  He was helping himself to a deep whiskey when he heard a footfall on the paving behind him. The cut-glass stopper slipped from his fingers and broke into pieces in the hearth.

  “How very awkward,” said Claire Maunde as he turned his flaming face to the fire. “Did I frighten you?”

  He couldn’t say a word. He held the retrieved pieces of glass in his hand as though they were the ruins of his soul, as indeed they seemed. She took them from him quite easily and said, “If I were you I’d drink up, then you can pour one for me.”

  “What on earth am I going to say?”

  “Women can get away with these things. Why not let me be the culprit?”

  “Would you?”

  He poured her out a glass of Irish whiskey and saw the grimace she made as she sipped it.

  “Don’t you like whiskey?”

  “Loathe it! But I suppose it’s in a good cause.”

  She sat there on the fender very lightly, unbelievably mature and assured; quite ignoring him while he gobbled up his enormous drink as though it were something solid. He knew she wasn’t being rude or cold, she was simply removed from him by what she was. Heavens! he thought, I couldn’t possibly get into her bed however much I wanted to; it would be an outrage. But how does she do it so effortlessly? He meant, Deal with me without a single mistake and then just sit there smoking and thinking as though we had never communicated. He also thought, I’d prefer her hostility. Where she’s concerned I’m not even the second footman; I’m Murphy. No, I’m not; she would respect Murphy because he’s a man.

  She had a black cigarette holder which he didn’t like. It was dated and he equated it with chorus girls in top hats and tails, their bosoms bowing out the boiled shirt. He said suddenly, “You shouldn’t use a cigarette holder.”

  “And why not?” she asked out of her distraction.

  He told her.

  “And you,” she said, “shouldn’t drink whiskey on an empty stomach, my boy.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  She ignored his agreement. She was away again thinking about whatever she was thinking about. Cavendish-Walker, he supposed, though what there was to think about Cavendish-Walker he couldn’t imagine. Once you’d pictured him with a gun in his hand there was no further refreshment you could get from him. Suddenly, as if by association of ideas, the Captain himself appeared. He came ponderously down the staircase, his rosy face shining above the black and white of his dinner dress.

  He saw her glass and sniffed the air.

  “Good God! Irish!”

  “Anything once,” she said.

  “But before dinner? My dear Claire.”

  “I broke the stopper, too,” she said.

  He examined the pieces. “A couple of rivets; no, three. Well, if everybody’s determined to give themselves a liver, why not?” And he helped himself to a half glass of Scotch.

  Murphy came in and sounded the second gong just as father and son came down the stairs; and they all went in to dinner.

  Afterwards, over the port, Palgrave, stiff with suppressed anger, said, “Blaydon is coming up to the attic. Will you excuse us, Father?”

  Chamberlyn-Ffynch nodded a dismissal and they went out into the silence of the hall, leaving an even bigger silence behind them in the dining-room.

  “Look here,” Palgrave said as they went up the back stairs, “what the devil did you drink before dinner?”

  “Only a glass of Irish. I’m fearfully sorry about it.”

  “ ‘Fearfully sorry’!” Palgrave mimicked him. “What’s the good of being ‘fearfully sorry’ now? You’ve ruined everything.”

  “But you told me to keep off shooting and servants and sex and politics and religion. I had to talk about something, and I might—”

  “I wish you wouldn’t think, then. Whenever you think you always seem to do something ill-advised.”

  “But everyone’s interested in their health,” John insisted. “At least I always thought so. It’s like the weather, and besides, it’s the only thing I know anything about.”

  “Hospitals are socially rockbottom,” said Palgrave, walking abruptly halfway up the servants’ staircase. “And even if they are mentioned one doesn’t make it an excuse to give revolting descriptions of cancer and tuberculosis in mixed company.”

  They went up to the draughty attics where between tunnels in the empty bare-boarded bedrooms Palgrave’s enormous but antiquated model railway sprawled under the dim lights.

  The next morning John was awakened by a maid fastening back the shutters and letting the blind up. Beside his bed she had placed a little tray on which was a round pot of tea, a little milk jug and a cup and saucer and, on a plate, two slices of soda bread spread with butter.

  While he ate and drank she unfolded a sheet of newspaper wrapped round sticks, cleaned the hearth and brought the smouldering turf fire to a blaze.

  Then she wished him good morning and left.

  He believed that she might have been pretty, but he wasn’t sure. He wished she could have sat on the bed beside him and then they could have talked. But he thought that under the circumstances, it would have been easier for him to talk to the King or Queen than to her; and as for the other suggestions which his mind made to him first thing in the morning, they were so compelling that they were best not acknowledged at all. Instead he allowed himself a vivid conjuration of Dymphna, imagining exactly how she would be looking at that very moment as she rose and dressed in Dublin. She looked good at dawn, he was sure, because she was pale anyway; painted with pallor and
soft shadows beneath the eyes, her lips violet-coloured after sleeping, perhaps, but later in the day warming through to the colour of reddest blood.

  The presence of her imagined beauty coupled with the certainty that at this moment she wouldn’t be thinking of him at all, the sudden recollection of the previous evening’s dinner party, combined into such a humiliation that it had him cursing to himself like a man in pain as he washed and dressed.

  But breakfast went off very well. These people had a sweet capacity for expunging the previous day, for rubbing out anything that might have been in the least unpleasant in their immediate past. It seemed to him that so far as they were concerned he’d been born again in the night, or that they had. They ate and talked their way through the long, delicious, breakfast: cold snipe sitting on toast spread with the birds’ own livers, bacon and eggs, plates full of Irish scones, butter and bitter marmalade. Cac Wac and Claire Maunde drank a pint and a half of coffee between them, while the father opened his letters and talked about the prospects of the morning’s shooting.

  This, when it came about, took most of the morning in the wet; the wet coming in from the sea in a pearly drizzle which penetrated everything. They strung out in a line across the heathery bog with Cac Wac repeatedly knocking down Chamberlyn-Ffynch’s woodcock and then apologizing. Next they were led by Murphy into a wide marsh where snipe whistled up in all directions, to be killed by the Captain who was strangely able to shoot backwards and sideways as well as forwards. His performance was so frightening that the others tended to string out round him in an increasingly wide half-circle. Palgrave was obviously more nervous than bored while his father became crisp and soldierly, giving commands to Murphy and ordering Claire and John to stay well back when the Captain was most heavily engaged. John himself fired only once at a reed warbler or bog pippet which he didn’t hit and about which nothing was said by anyone, though Murphy smiled.

  At lunch there were difficult silences and afterwards the father disappeared into his study. Claire Maunde got herself into a chair with a novel and read and smoked in a proclamatory way, saying by her attitude, I do not wish to be spoken to; I am reading and smoking. She also seemed to suggest, You all bore me, I am a woman bored by men. The Captain, great blind oaf that he was, tried to get her talking once or twice, was snubbed and eventually slipped into a healthy sleep in the opposite chair. Sitting on the fender with Palgrave, John watched Claire Maunde and thought sinfully about her: that if she would acknowledge him, if only she would, then he would suggest that they go to her bedroom together with the book and the cigarettes. He thought she might make love in the same absorbed way in which she read and smoked; there would be no need whatsoever to talk; and therefore, he said to himself, “it will take my mind off Dymphna.”

  But his study of her was crossed by the closeness of Palgrave, who was haughtily miserable. Circles of his discomfort wavered disturbingly over John’s vivid but fatiguing imaginings. Palgrave repeatedly tapped his cigarette with his finger, a minute drumming; he got up and sat down several times; eventually he cozened John out of the hall with him, Claire Maunde not even glancing up as they left.

  They went to see Lady Eleanora Chamberlyn-Ffynch who lived in a separate part of the house. She was in all “the Books”; the connection by which Palgrave was linked to Galway, Fyffeshire, Leicestershire and certain extinct baronies in Burgundy and Bavaria.

  Palgrave said, “You made such as ass of yourself this morning.”

  John ignored this and asked, “Is she your grandmother?”

  “Great. She’s a hundred and two. Please be quick and quiet; if Shelagh finds out we’ve been in to see her she’ll be extremely annoyed.”

  They came to a green baize door on which patterns were studded with brass-headed nails. Beyond it there was another door of heavy waxed oak and through this a small tiled vestibule scented with chrysanthemums. Palgrave opened a third, white-painted door and disclosed a long room with a moulded ceiling.

  It was was strewn with small tables and fern stands carrying silver-framed photographs and ceramics, miniatures, powder boxes and paperweights; there were showcases full of ivory figurines, golden teaspoons and collections of Empire fans, their lattices strung with feathers, paste and semi-precious stones; there were museum-type display cabinets full of medals, stars, orders, Greek and Roman coins, and Anglo-Saxon jewellery. On the walls were ranged glass walking-sticks like barley sugar and icicles, some of them with coloured glass spiralling and flowering in their centres. Family portraits and coats of arms hung surrounded by festoons of African weapons and ostrich-plumed fans. Wherever there was space there were bookcases filled with slender bindings and limited editions. There were marquetry cabinets, a score of Victorian and Edwardian watercolours with gilt frames of mansions and manors, Italian villas and butterfly-rigged sailings ships and boats.

  At the far end there was a dull turf fire, sweetening the labyrinthine air and a scrap screen with Queen Victoria bonneted and bunned in one of the panels and Prince Edward with Princess Alexandra in another.

  They went quickly down the long room, circling the many tables and stands, and Palgrave said, “You can look round the screen.”

  “What shall I say?”

  “She’s stone deaf and practically blind, but I want you to see her.”

  “But she may not like being looked at.”

  “My great-grandmother’s the most aristocratic woman in Ireland. She was an intimate friend of Queen Alexandra’s and a mistress of Edward the Seventh. She may die at any moment.”

  John humoured him. He also humoured himself: he wanted to see the owner of the room which lay round them like the spoils of an empire. He stood up on a Victorian footstool prickled with greeny-purple vine leaves, their edges frosted with white beads, and leaned over the top of the screen. Below him, her rusty dress fluffed out sickly as a bird’s plumage, the old lady nested in her wing chair. Her eyes, beneath stretched brows, were foggy with cataract and her nose, like a dead person’s, was as inanimate as thin yellow wax stayed upon an armature, a modeller’s “rough.”

  He saw the old and beautiful silk of her gown, a ruby thread in the black warp so that it glowed as a charcoal fire glows through its blackness. He saw the rings sliding like dolls’ bangles up the wasted fingers of the upraised right hand as she picked and twirled ceaselessly with first one then another sharp nail at her nostrils.

  He tried to see her dancing, receiving ambassadorial guests in distant legations; he tried to fill in the yellow hollows of the cheeks and see the eyes, once black as her grandson’s, old Chamberlyn-Ffynch, sliding away over a fan in some exquisite calculation; but all he could see were the materials housed in the smoky dress and the gesture of boredom of an old child waiting for someone to come or for something to happen.

  “Well?” said Palgrave. “What’s she doing?”

  To avoid a betrayal, John replied, “She isn’t doing anything.”

  “Let me see.”

  “You can look round the edge, can’t you?”

  “If she saw me I’d have to introduce you.”

  “But I’d like to be introduced.”

  “It would upset Shelagh.”

  John got down and Palgrave glanced over the screen. He looked disgusted and hurried out of the room immediately. He said, “I thought we might go over to tea with Grania de Savigny.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Her father’s the Marquis de Savigny. It’s one of those Roman Catholic titles; very old, though.”

  “The Marquis de Savigny,” John said, “Marquis de—, Marquis de—! How fascinating! What’s Grania like?”

  “I wish to God you had some other clothes,” said Palgrave.

  “So do I; but what’s she like?”

  “That’s what she’s like, she’ll simply loathe that suit: it shows your behind.”

  “I don’t want to see any bloody little stuck-up Catholic snobs,” John retorted, “unless they’re extremely pretty.”

  �
�If you had a good big pullover—I’ll see if I can borrow one from Cac Wac. It couldn’t look worse than that suit.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Blonde or brunette?”

  “She has fair hair.”

  “Blonde then,” said John.

  “One doesn’t use the word. It sounds like a servants’ magazine.”

  They were on the way to the stables where the cars were garaged.

  “I don’t think I’ll come,” John said, “you’re so arrogant.”

  Palgrave said, “You’ll just have to learn. If only you knew how irritating it is for me when you’re always getting things just slightly wrong.”

  “In that case, why did you bring me?”

  “Because,” said Palgrave, “if you want to know, you’re so damn sweet.”

  He was smiling, there was impatient wit in his face. A rolypoly; a fat young boy or girl, even a debutante not yet fined down. John was able to switch his own sex in that instant with all the ease that had been denied him in wanting to restore youth to Lady Eleanora Chamberlyn-Ffynch. He knew even that it was good to be loved by this ugly little creature, her great-grandson. He was in an instant delighted by looking into and conquering the black eyes of the father in the face of the son. Then, as a lightning strike first illumines and as immediately blackens a tree, he was shivered over with a fire of disgust so secret and shameful that its experience must scarcely be acknowledged even to himself. He felt himself blushing and, as he did so, thought, I am become a lover; he will interpret my colour as complicity, God help him.

  They borrowed an outsize hacking jersey from Cac Wac which John wore with his tweed trousers. It made him feel slender and frail. Within a few minutes of putting it on he wanted to take it off again because of this effect, because of being driven about by Palgrave as though he were a woman. At first he tried to invent excuses for turning back, for showing his independence; to insist on walking, perhaps? But whatever conduct he settled upon, it would only be interpreted as gaucherie or temperament. Palgrave would say to himself, “He’s being difficult,” or perhaps he might say, “She’s being difficult.”