by C. P. Snow
Lady Boscastle asked me to take up Humphrey.
“He will do the talking if you sit about,” she said. “That is one of your qualities, my dear boy. Do what you can, won’t you? I shouldn’t like him to go off the rails too far. He would always have his own distinction, you know, whatever he did. But it would distress his father so much. There are very strong bonds between them. These Bevill men are really very unrestrained.”
Lady Boscastle gave a delicate and malicious smile. She had an indulgent amused contempt for men whose emotions enslaved them. There was a cat-like solitariness about her, which meant she could disinterest herself from those who adored her. That night, while everyone else in the party was bored or strained, she was bright-eyed, mocking, cynically enjoying herself. Her concern about her son did not depress her. She waved it away, and talked instead of Roy and Joan; for now, in her invalid years, observing love affairs was what gave her most delight.
She had, of course, no doubt of their relation. Her eyes were too experienced to miss anything so patent. In fact, she was offended because Joan made it too patent. Lady Boscastle had a fastidious sense of proper reserve. “Of course, my dear boy, it is a great pleasure to brandish a lover, isn’t it? Particularly when one has been rather uncompeted for.” Otherwise it seemed to her only what one would expect. She was not used to passing judgments, except on points of etiquette and taste. And she conceded that Roy “would pass”. She had never herself found him profoundly “sympathique”. I thought that night that I could see the reason. She was suspicious that much of his emotional life had nothing to do with love. She divined that, if she had been young, he would have smiled and made love – but there were depths she could not have touched. She would have resented it then, and she resented it now. She wanted men whose whole emotional resources, all of whose power and imagination, could be thrown into gallantry, and the challenge and interplay of love.
She would have kept him at a distance: but she admitted that other women would have chased him. Her niece was showing reasonable taste. As for her niece, Lady Boscastle had a pitying affection.
She speculated on what was happening that night. “There’s thunder in the air,” she said. She looked at me enquiringly.
“I know nothing,” I said.
“Of course, he’s breaking away,” said Lady Boscastle. “That jumps to the eye. And it’s making her more infatuated every minute. No doubt she feels obliged to put all her cards on the table. Poor Joan, she would do that. She’s rather unoblique.”
Lady Boscastle went on: “And he feels insanely irritable, naturally. It’s very odd, my dear Lewis, how being loved brings out the worst in comparatively amiable people. One sees these worthy creatures lying at one’s feet and protesting their supreme devotion. And it’s a great strain to treat them with even moderate civility. I doubt whether anyone is nice enough to receive absolutely defenceless love.
“Love affairs,” said Lady Boscastle, “are not intriguing unless both of you have a second string. Never go lovemaking, my dear boy, unless you have someone to fall back upon in case of accidents. I remember – ah! I’ve told you already.” She smiled with a reminiscence, affectionate, sub-acid and amused. “But our dear Joan would never equip herself with a reserve. She’ll never be rusée. She’s rather undevious for this pastime.”
“It’s a pity,” I said.
“Poor Joan.” There was contempt, pity, triumph in Lady Boscastle’s tone. “Of course it’s she who’s taken him out tonight. It’s she who wants to get things straight. You saw that, of course. She has insisted on meeting him after dinner tonight. I suppose she’s making a scene at this minute. She couldn’t wait another day before having it out. I expect that is how she welcomed Master Roy this morning. Poor Joan. She ought to know it’s fatal. If a love affair has come to the point when one needs to get things straight, then” – she smiled at me – “it’s time to think a little about the next.”
23: A Cry in the Evening
The next day was fine, and the rooms of Boscastle stood lofty and deserted in the sunshine. I had breakfast alone, in the parlour, which was the image of the “painted room” but on the south side of the house, away from the sea. The Boscastles breakfasted in their rooms, and there was no sign of Joan or Roy. Lady Muriel had been up two hours before, and was – so I gathered from whispered messages which a footman kept bringing to the butler – issuing her final orders for the picnic.
The papers had not yet arrived, and I drank my tea watching the motes dance in a beam of sunshine. It was a warm, hushed, shimmering morning.
The butler came and spoke to me. His tone was hushed, but not at all sleepy. He looked harassed and overburdened.
“Her ladyship sends her compliments, sir, and asks you to make your own way to the picnic site during the morning.”
“I haven’t any idea where the site is,” I said.
“I think I can show you, sir, from the front entrance. It is just inside the grounds, where the wall goes nearest to the sea.”
“Inside the grounds? We’re having this picnic inside the grounds?”
“Yes, sir. Her ladyship’s picnics have always been inside the grounds. It makes it impossible for the party to be observed.”
I walked into the village to buy some cigarettes. At the shop I overheard some gossip about the new vicar. Apparently a young lady had arrived the night before at one of the hotels. She had gone to the vicarage that morning. They were wondering suspiciously whether he intended to get married.
On my way to the site I wondered casually to myself who it might be. The thought of Rosalind crossed my mind, and then I dismissed it. I went into the grounds, through the side gates which opened on to the cliff road, down through the valley by the brook. It was not hard to find the site, for it was marked by a large flag. Lady Muriel was already sitting beside it on a shooting stick, looking as isolated as Amundsen at the South Pole. The ground beside her was arrayed with plates, glasses, dishes, siphons, bottles of wine. She called out to me with unexpected geniality.
“Good morning. You’re the first. I’m glad to see someone put in an appearance. We couldn’t have been luckier in the weather, could we?”
From the site there was no view, except for the brook and trees and wall, unless one looked north: there one got a magnificent sight of the house of Boscastle: the classical front, about a mile away, took in the whole foreground. It was a crowning stroke, I thought, to have chosen a site with that particular view.
But Lady Muriel was on holiday.
“I consider that all the arrangements are in hand,” she said. “Perhaps you would like me to show you some things?”
She led me up some steps in the wall, which brought us to a small plateau. From the plateau we clambered down across the road over to a headland. Below the headland the sea was slumberously rolling against the cliffs. There was a milky spume fringing the dark rocks: and further out the water lay a translucent green in the warm, misty morning.
“We used to have picnics here in the old days,” said Lady Muriel. “Before I decided it was unnecessary to go outside our grounds.”
She looked towards the mansion on its hill. It moved her to see it reposing there, the lawns bright, the house with the sun behind it. She was as inarticulate as ever.
“We’re lucky to have such an excellent day.” Then she did manage to say: “I have always been fond of our house.”
She tried to trace the coast line for me, but it was hidden in the mist.
“Well,” she said briskly, in a moment, “we must be getting back to our picnic. All the arrangements are in order, of course. I have never found it difficult to make arrangements. I did not find them irksome in the Lodge. I have found it strange not to have to make them – since my husband’s death.”
She missed them, of course, and she was happy that morning. We had begun to leave the headland, with Lady Muriel telling me of how she used to climb the rocks when she was a girl. Then, in the distance along the road, I saw a wo
man walking. I thought I recognised the walk. It was not stately, it was not poised, it was hurried, quick-footed and loose. As she came nearer, I saw that I was right. It was Rosalind. She was wearing a very smart tweed suit, much too smart by the Boscastles’ standards. And she was twirling a stick.
I hoped that she might not notice us. But she looked up, started, broke into a smile open-eyed, ill-used, pathetic and brazen. She gave a cheerful, defiant wave. I waved back. Lady Muriel did not stir a muscle.
When we saw Rosalind’s back, Lady Muriel enquired in an ominous tone: “Is that the young woman who used to throw her cap so abominably at Roy?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What is she doing here?”
“She is a friend of Ralph Udal’s,” I said. “She must be visiting him.” To myself I could think of no other explanation. So far as I knew, she had given up the pursuit of Roy. In any case, she could not have known that he was staying at Boscastle that week. It was a singular coincidence.
“Really,” said Lady Muriel. Her indignation mounted. She was no longer genial to me. “So now she sees herself as a clergyman’s wife, does she? Mr Eliot, I understand that the lower classes are very lax with their children. If that young woman had been my daughter, she would have been thrashed.”
She continued to fume as we made our way back to the site. It was too far from the house for Lady Boscastle to walk; she had been driven as far as the path would take a car, and supported the rest of the way by her maid. Lord Boscastle was sitting there disconsolately, and complaining to Roy. Roy listened politely, his face grave. It was the first time I had seen him that day, and I knew no more than the night before.
Lady Muriel could not contain her disgust. She gave a virulent description of Rosalind’s latest outrage.
“You didn’t know she was coming, Roy, I assume?”
“No. She hasn’t written to me for a year,” said Roy.
“I’m very glad to hear it,” said Lady Muriel, and burst out into fury at the picture of Rosalind walking “insolently” past the walls of Boscastle.
Roy said nothing. I fancied there was a glint – was it admiration? – in his eye.
“I hope this fellow Udal isn’t going to be a nuisance,” said Lord Boscastle. “There’s a great deal to be said for the celibacy of the clergy. But I don’t see why the young woman shouldn’t look him up. I always felt you were hard on her, Muriel.”
“Hard on her?” cried Lady Muriel. “Why, she’s nothing more nor less than a trollop.”
Soon after, Joan came walking by the brook. Her dress was white and flowered, and glimmered in the sunshine. As she called out to us, in an even voice, I was watching her closely. She was very pale. She had schooled herself not to do more than glance at Roy. She made conversation with her uncle. She was carrying herself with a hard control. She had all her mother’s inflexible sense of decorum. In public, one must go on as though nothing had happened. How brave she was, I thought.
A file of servants came down from the house with hampers, looking like the porters on de Saussure’s ascent of Mont Blanc. Cold chickens were brought out, tongues, patties: Lady Muriel jollied us vigorously to get to our lunch. Meanwhile Lady Boscastle’s lorgnette was directed for a moment at Joan, and then at Roy.
“I don’t for the life of me see,” said Lord Boscastle, gazing wistfully at the house, “why I should be dragged out here. When I might be eating in perfect comfort in my house.”
It sounded a reasonable lament. It sounded more reasonable than it was. For in the house we should in fact have been eating a tepid and indifferent lunch, instead of this delectable cold one. Lady Muriel had bludgeoned the kitchen into efficiency, which Lady Boscastle did not exert herself to do. It was the best meal I remembered at Boscastle.
We ended with strawberries and moselle. Lady Boscastle, who was eating less each month, got through her portion.
“It’s a fine taste, my dear Muriel,” she said, “I recall vividly the first time someone gave it me–”
I recognised that tone by now. It meant that she was thinking of some admirer in the past. I did not know how much Joan was listening to her aunt: but she made herself put a decent face on it.
After lunch, Lady Muriel was not ready to let us rest.
“Archery,” she said inexorably. Another file of servants came down with targets, quivers, cases of bows. The targets were set up and we shot through the sleepy afternoon. Lord Boscastle was fairly practised, and it was the kind of game to which Roy and I applied ourselves. I noticed Lady Boscastle watching the play of muscle underneath Roy’s shirt. She kept an interest in masculine grace. I thought she was surprised to see how strong he was.
Joan shot with us for a time. She and Roy spoke to each other only about the game, though once, when he misfired, she said, with a flash of innocence, intimacy, forgetfulness: “It must have bounced off that joint. Didn’t you feel it?” She was speaking of the first finger of his left hand; the top joint had grown askew. She was not looking at his hand. She knew it by heart.
Lady Boscastle was assisted to the car before tea. For the rest of us, tea was brought down from the house, though Lady Muriel maintained the al fresco spirit by boiling our own water over a spirit stove. Lord Boscastle said, as though aggrieved: “You ought to know by now, Muriel, that I’m no good at tea.” He drank a cup, and felt that he had served his sentence for the day. So he too went towards the house, having taken the precaution of booking Joan for bridge that night.
Some time after, the four of us started to follow him. Lady Muriel had uprooted the flag, and was carrying it home; all the paraphernalia of the meals was left for the servants. The site looked overcrowded with crockery: we had left it behind when Roy suddenly challenged me to a last round with the bow.
“Just two more shots, Lady Mu,” he said. “We’ll catch you up.”
Joan hesitated, as if she were pulled back to watch. Then she walked away with her mother.
Roy and I shot our arrows. As we went towards the targets to retrieve them, Roy said: “It’s over with Joan and me.”
“I was afraid so.”
“If she comes to you, try and help. She may not come. She’s dreadfully proud. But if she does, please try and help.” His face was angry, dark and strained. “She has so little confidence. Try everything you know.”
I said that I would.
“Tell her I’m useless,” he said. “Tell her I can’t stand anyone for long unless they’re as useless as I am. Tell her I’m mad.”
He plucked an arrow from the target, and spoke quietly and clearly: “There’s one thing she mustn’t believe. She mustn’t think she’s not attractive. It matters to her – intolerably. Tell her anything you like about me – so long as she doesn’t think that.”
He was torn and overcome. He was unusually reticent about his love affairs: even in our greatest intimacy, he had told me little. But that afternoon, as we walked up the valley, he spoke with a bitter abandon. Physical passion meant much to Joan, more than to any woman he had known. Unless she found it again, she could not stop herself becoming harsh and twisted. We were getting close behind Joan and her mother, and he could not say more. But before we caught them up, he said: “Old boy, there’s not much left.”
It was some days before I spoke to Joan. She was not a woman on whom one could intrude sympathy. The party stretched on through empty days. Roy took long walks with Lady Muriel, and I spent much time by Lady Boscastle’s chair. She had diagnosed the state of her niece’s affair, and had lost interest in it. “My dear boy, the grand climaxes of all love affairs are too much the same. Now the overtures have a little more variety.” At dinner the political quarrels became rougher: we tried to shut them out, but the news would not let us. There was only one improvement as the days dragged by: Roy and I became steadily more accurate with the long bow.
One night towards the end of the week I went for a walk alone after dinner. I climbed out of the grounds and up to the headland, so as to watch the s
un set over the sea. It was a cloudless night: the western sky was blazing and the horizon clear as a knife-edge.
As I stood there, I heard steps on the grass. Joan had also come alone. She gazed at me, her expression heavy and yet open in the bright light.
“Lewis,” she said. So much feeling welled up in the one word that I took a chance.
“Joan,” I said, “I’ve wanted to say something to you. Twelve months ago Roy told me I made things harder for him. You ought to know the reason. It was because I understood a little about him.”
“Why are you telling me this?” she cried.
“It is the same with you.”
“Are you trying to comfort me?”
She burst out: “I wonder if it’s true. I don’t know. I don’t know anything now. I’ve given up trying to understand.”
I put my arm round her, and at the touch she began to speak with intense emotion.
“I can’t give him up,” she said. “Sometimes I think I only exist so far as I exist in his mind. If he doesn’t think of me, then I fall to pieces. There’s nothing of me any more.”
“Would it be better,” I said, “if he went away?”
“No,” she cried, in an access of fear. “You’re to tell him nothing. You’re not to tell him to go. He must stay here. My mother needs him. You know how much she needs him.”
It was true, but it was a pretext by which Joan saved her pride. For still she could not bear to let him out of her sight.
Perhaps she knew that she had given herself away, for suddenly her tone changed. She became angry with a violence that I could feel shaking her body.
“He’ll stay because she needs him,” she said with ferocity. “He’ll consider anything she wants. He’s nice and considerate with her. So he is with everyone – except me. He’s treated me abominably. He’s behaved like a cad. He’s treated me worse than anyone I could have picked up off the streets. He’s wonderful with everyone – and he’s treated me like a cad.”
