As they went down white roads across the bogs and marshes, circled the great estate wall of the Marquis de Savigny, John smoked one of his own cigarettes while Palgrave sat there smiling to himself as contentedly as a lover declared. There was no means of expunging that smile. To say, “What d’you mean, I’m so damned sweet?” would be as indelicate as saying to Lady Eleanora Chamberlyn-Ffynch, “Stop picking your nose,” when one was not even supposed to be in her presence.
These people did not conversationally acknowledge a number of things: indigestion, poverty, sickness, senility, religion, drunkenness or adultery. They certainly would not acknowledge pederasty; they would send it to Australia. So how could he say anything so direct to Palgrave as “I’m not that sort of a boy,” and he added to himself—“or girl.”
How shaming. How disgusting. Why, even in the saying of it he would be confirming a possibility. His whole mistake had been in going about with Palgrave in the first place and that had only been in order to impress Dymphna.
It occurred to him then that she might feel about him as he himself felt about Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch. That simply by seeking her out and desiring her he was forcing something utterly ugly and distasteful upon her from which there was no escape so long as she consorted with him, and that she too might be doing this only in order to impress her parents or friends.
He thought, When this weekend is over I shall never see Chamberlyn-Ffynch again. In the meantime I shall keep my distance and be silent. I’ll go hell for leather for this de Savigny girl however haughty and ugly she is.
She came down the steps to meet them in jodhpurs and a yellow pullover. She certainly wasn’t exciting to see. A boyish face, almost a comedian’s, with a fat red little nose and greedy lips, round blue eyes full of fresh air; a dumpy figure.
“Palgrave!” she said. “Thank God you’ve come, I’m so deadly bored.”
She stiffened at the introduction and looked John up and down very quickly with her full and silly blue eyes, as blue as the red cheeks were red.
“He’s just staying till tomorrow,” Palgrave said, “I was so bored myself I couldn’t face another Sunday at Trinity on my own with all those awful Arts students—”
“I can’t think why ever you went there.”
“It’s my father; he’s got an idea we’re all finished. We’ve lost so much on the estate in the last ten years that he insists on my having a degree in case I ever have to work for my living.”
The house was very large, so great that John could never quite remember it afterwards. It was of stone, there were vast pillars, softly fluted, morticed Stonehengian horizontals held up over their heads and rows of Georgian glassed windows thinly distorting the reflections of sky and trees, of shadows and columns. The door mat beneath the centre of the portico was as large as a carpet and beside it there were bristling hedgehog machines for the cleaning of boots.
The site was the level top of a nearly round hill, the land falling away beyond the limits of the shingled drive into terraced gardens and a ha-ha beyond which there were rough fields and deciduous woods clothing the near slope of the surrounding valley.
Still talking, they went down to the first terrace where a rococo fountain dripped and dribbled over mossy fish, stone anchors and windings of fishermen’s net. The water in the basin was green-black, large golden carp were submerged in its murk, their scales dimmed by sediment and disease. The unshaved box hedges of the formal gardens stretching away to right and left enclosed geometrical beds which were growing weeds among the dwarf cacti and perennials.
The girl said, “We could go and have a drink at one of the pubs. There’s never anything in the house.”
Peasant-fashion, she was scratching at her back with a switch she had pulled in passing and she was walking closely with Palgrave as though they understood one another; either to titillate John, so he thought, or else because she hadn’t liked the look of him. She was about the same height as Palgrave and nearly as ugly if one allowed for the fact that she was a girl. John wondered what were the proper motions of gallantry when it was not felt; it was difficult enough when it was genuine but he was no good at the acted lie. He was very conscious of the house rising behind them with its tall windows and sea-green cupola, the dockyard scale of its architecture and equipment. It was the only possible aspect of the girl which could attract him; the imagining of her growing up in all this careless space, carelessly. “And I am here!” he said to himself. “I am walking with a Marquis’ daughter through terraced gardens!”
He was turning back towards the car when Palgrave asked him where he was going.
“I thought we were going to have a drink in a pub.”
Then the de Savigny girl laughed and Palgrave smiled with her.
“God!” he said. “He does this sort of thing all the time. Surely you don’t imagine we have to drive?”
“It’s one of Daddy’s pubs,” said Grania. “We have two villages on the estate and three pubs. We’re going to the nearest one just beyond the folly. Tim O’Hagan’s.”
When they got there, it was a cottage with a counter on which stood a barrel of Guinness. John said, “I don’t call this a pub.”
“It’s probably not what you’re used to,” she said.
“Road houses,” Palgrave added with fatigue.
The cottager, O’Hagan, served them with deference but a disinterest similar to that of Murphy, so that John wondered if all the country Irish had this air of acting out their relationship with their masters.
They drank at first two pints of Guinness each, then John insisted on a third and persuaded the others to join him. He wanted to drink up the house, all its darkness, tipping down into himself the cold brown murk of the pool, the slow golden carp and the wet woods of oak and elm. The Guinness seemed to him to be a distillation of these things, the drink which would spring naturally from the ground if it were broached; tasting of good earth and bitterness, of deep timbered roots, and supporting on its brim a thick sweet foam.
They went back to the house the long way round and came to a shrine in the woods. It was a beech tree beside a leaf-sodden path, to the bole of which a blue statue of the Madonna had been fixed at eye level. On a little tray at the foot of the pedestal children had arranged flowers in empty potted-meat jars. The flowers had withered and mildewed in the wet and there was orange-coloured lichen sprouting in the eye sockets and from the folds of the blue mantle of the Virgin.
Grania and Palgrave went straight past it but John stopped because of the intense surprise it caused him. Though so innocent it seemed to be in such very bad taste and its neglect deprived it even of pathos. When he caught the others up he asked, “Why do you have a statue there?”
“Daddy’s villagers are always putting them up,” she said. “We don’t mind; do you?”
“But why?”
“Isn’t he dreary?” she said to Palgrave. “Because one of them probably saw a vision there or got her rheumatism cured when she was getting firewood from the tree, or poaching.”
Palgrave started to sing. He did this quite suddenly since it was a habit of his about twenty minutes after he’d had something to drink. He sat down on a fallen tree in his sleek suit and sang in a light but true tenor:
“Believe me if all these endearing young charms
Which I gaze on so fondly to-day …”
Grania carolled up with him at the bare treetops and the rooks’ nests, coming in with:
“Were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my arms
Like fairy gifts fading away …”
And John sang with them:
“You would still be adored as this moment you are
Let your loveliness fade as it will …”
But at this point Grania frowned and walked away smacking at her left thigh with the switch she had pulled from an ash tree. She called, “Who were you singing for, Palgrave?”
And Palgrave just got up, still singing and doing absurd half-pirouettes on the wet path.
He was quite carried away by his own mood and voice, or seemed to want to give the impression that he was.
So, looking at John, she said, “If it was for you, I don’t agree with him, because first, you’re rather urban and second you’ve got eyes like pee-holes in the snow.”
He chased her then and she ran off the path and up the slope which was clothed with bluebell leaves and wet wood garlic. They both kept slipping on the slimy leaves and falling down on their faces. John pursued Grania and Palgrave pursued John. Grania clambered up an oak tree onto a thick dead branch and when John reached it she started to move out astride it further and further away from the trunk. Palgrave stood below, still serenading them, this time with “The Rose of Tralee.” The branch broke just as John got hold of one of Grania’s ankles and they fell together onto the garlic slope clawing at each other, rolling down in the soft black earth through the oily aromatic leaves. Eventually he got on top of her, sitting on her stomach, holding her hands pinioned back behind her head so that she could only try to nudge him with her knees or throw him off by bunting her hips against his buttocks. He was going to have said something in this moment when suddenly he saw that the face and the hair against the ground were not Victoria’s. He realized then that, for an instant, he had been back at the lake where she had nearly drowned ten years before, that instead of a face Victoria would have by now only a skull. Palgrave pulled him off and Grania got up unconcernedly.
“You look better now,” she said to John, “not so towny, and Palgrave looks frightful; it doesn’t suit him to be dirty on the outside.”
They were all a little out of breath, daubed over with black earth marks and green stains, their clothes and hair powdered with mosses and lichens.
“We’ll all go and have baths,” Grania said, “and then tea—if I can get anyone to bring it.”
They went back to the house and through a wide hall to the staircase. The walls were covered with paintings of horses posed stiffly against skyscapes and dull green fields. Grania saw John looking at them and said, “Horses downstairs, cardinals upstairs—you two can share this bathroom; I’ll bring you some towels later. You can dump your things in the Cardinal’s Room.”
For a portrait gallery the first-floor landing was very dark but the de Savigny bishops and cardinals could be seen in their scarlet, poised against the dimness within their frames. To stand there was like standing outside the house, its previously black and empty windows now all mysteriously tenanted and filled by priests and fire.
Palgrave was waiting in the Cardinal’s Room by a four-poster with a crimson brocade canopy. The only other furniture was a long brocade-covered ottoman, a mother-of-pearl-studded prie dieu large enough for the prayers of a giant, and a Victorian mahogany dressing table. On the chimney breast was a six-foot crucifix in bronze with an ivory Christ impaled through His wrists, with the hands and fingers curling like the edges of exotic shells over the metal heads of the nails.
Palgrave laid himself down on the great bed with his hands behind his head, and yawned. “I feel so sleepy,” he said in his nanny voice. “That long walk and all that stout.”
John looked at and then disregarded him. He did not look like a cardinal though he could well have been a cardinal’s nephew in the Borgia period; he looked so rich and fat and corrupt.
Palgrave said, “I’m so dreadfully dizzy. Go and turn on the bath, John.”
John was thinking, If only it were Dymphna. Why do I never get the people I want into the times and places I want for them? How often have I imagined her on a bed less magnificent than this, pretending to be a little drunk and sleepy, languorous? But when it comes about, I get a toad instead.
Palgrave said, “You’ll have to help me to get my things off, I’m completely désoeuvré.”
John thought, And Victoria’s dead. He went across the hall past the cardinals into a dark creaking corridor with the ridiculous rhyme repeating itself to the measure of his footsteps:
“A toad instead,
And Victoria’s dead
A toad—instead.”
He found a large bathroom with a yellow-lined wood-panelled bath with taps labelled “Press for Hot” and “Press for Cold.” There was a central spout through which the conjoined streams were supposed to flow in equable union, but the water remained tepid no matter what combination of pressures he tried.
The bathroom was L-shaped; in addition to the bath it contained a wastepaper basket made of an elephant’s forefoot complete with its horny nails and, in the short limb of the L, a club-type lavatory upholstered in old ring velvet. The walls of the small annexe were decorated with greening photographs of Oxford undergraduates of the late 1920’s with menu cards of defunct societies like the Gravediggers and steel engravings of Cardinal Newman and Bishop Bourne. John expected to see the face of Greenbloom amongst those of the mooning and arrogant young men until he realized that the period was a little too early. But he did find a cryptic placard bearing a borrowed coat of arms which proclaimed: “E. St. C. W. sat here 1928.”
He went back to the door and turned the Victorian lock punched with the words: Hobbs, London, Machine-made patent lever, undressed and got into the lukewarm water.
When Palgrave knocked at the door John called out, “The lock’s gone wrong. You’ll have to get Grania to give you another bathroom.”
“Let me in, I’m freezing.”
“The lock’s jammed.”
He half-expected Palgrave to say, “Love laughs at locksmiths,” but instead he became angry.
“You haven’t tried. Get out of the bath and rattle the thing from your side.”
“It’s no good, I’ve tried, it’s jammed. When you get hold of Grania, do ask her to bring me some towels.”
To keep himself warm and to baffle Palgrave he started to sing:
“I wonder why you keep me waiting, Charmaine, my Charmaine?” and after a few minutes Palgrave went away.
John allowed him time to get out of the Cardinal’s bedroom and then went back there himself and dried on the Cardinal’s curtains.
When he got down to the hall again Grania, who was looking fresher and pinker than ever, said, “Wherever did you get to? I took towels along to Palgrave and he told me you’d got yourself locked in one of the lavs.”
“It was a bathroom.”
“Really, which one?”
“Bathroom and lav combined.”
“Oh,” she said, “that’s my brother’s bathroom, Sebastian’s.”
John said, “I’m freezing cold. Did you manage to rake up any tea?”
“Palgrave said there wouldn’t be time, he’s in a tearing temper about something. Have you been beastly to him?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He’s probably in love with you,” she said, “my brother was like that for a time, so I know.”
But at this point Palgrave came down the stairs looking very reserved. His manner was expressively formal and he maintained it the whole way back to Ffynchfort.
When they got in, Claire Maunde, slumped in an armchair with the same novel on her knee, asked them, “Well, did you two have a good time?”
“Not bad,” said Palgrave.
“Where was it you went?”
“To the de Savigny’s.”
“Romans, aren’t they?” asked Cac Wac. “Personally I could never stand Romans in the Mess. They’re either totally irreligious with no belief in anything, or else they’re religious from first to last, which is damned unhealthy.”
Charles Chamberlyn-Ffynch came out of his study when Murphy was serving the sherry and the conversation was dropped until the man had gone.
“Must be awkward,” said Cac Wac, “living in a Catholic country, isn’t it, Charles? I suppose you’ve never been quite sure of them since the Easter Rising? Beats me how you manage to live at peace at all.”
“It’s a question of tolerance, really, in all things,” said old Chamberlyn-Ffynch. “Tomorrow, for instance, the servants will go off to
Mass in the village at seven, lay on breakfast for themselves and us at eight thirty and the house will go down to Wilson’s Mattins at ten. Never have much real trouble.”
At dinner the Captain hinted that he was some kind of a spiritualist, “No affiliations, though; don’t believe in organized religion.” He talked portentously about a man he knew down in Norfolk who lived in two caravans, one filled with cage birds and books, the other his living quarters. This fellow, an Old Harrovian, knew things; he could establish contact with the dead and had a local reputation as a wart charmer and spiritual healer. He had even, or three occasions, claimed cures of cancer. The villagers from miles around consulted him about their own disorders and those of their stock; they sought his offices over their bereavements and love affairs and hauntings. “And you can laugh,” said Cac Wac, “as no doubt you will, but that’s the fellow whose advice I should seek if ever I were in real trouble.”
Claire Maunde became caustic. “D’you mean trouble with your liver, your love life or your ancestors?”
“Ah!” said Cac Wac, “that’s the point, how does one know that they’re not all connected? That’s Wilbraham’s view, anyway, one of his Seven Points.”
“You really mean to say that if someone you were fond of died or you thought you’d seen a ghost or got cancer you’d go off to this ridiculous man in the caravan?”
“There’d be no need to go to him. I’d simply send Wilbraham a letter and a guinea or two and by return of post I’d get back a card giving me his instructions.”
“What kind of instructions?”
“That would depend. It’s not the kind of thing one likes to talk about.”
“I should think not,” she said. And she got up and left them to drink their port alone.
Through Streets Broad and Narrow Page 9
