Ripeness is All

by Eric Linklater

  Mrs Barrow seemed disposed to argue the point, but Wilfrid, happier now, took her by the shoulders and playfully pushed her out of the room, crying, ‘Run along to your kitchen, Mrs Barrow, because I’ve lots and lots of work to do, and if you don’t make something extra specially lovely for lunch I’m going to be very very angry with you.’

  Greatly cheered by sympathy and Mrs Barrow’s high opinion of him, he returned to his desk and quickly dealt with the young man from Birkenhead. Then he wrote an encouraging letter to a typist in Wolverhampton who had composed, for Lesson III, a bright little article entitled ‘Why I Am Romantic’; and, with less approval, criticized a pessimistic essay from an unemployed riveter on Tyneside, who had chosen the alternative exercise, ‘Are We Really Civilized?’ ‘You will never be able to sell work of this description,’ he wrote. ‘To be successful you must be cheerful. No editor will buy a gloomy, morbid article when he has the chance of printing something bright, joyous, optimistic, and, of course, well-written. Your vocabulary is good, and so is your power of description, but you will have to avoid a tendency to pessimism if you want to make literature profitable.’

  Meanwhile Stephen and Bolivia, having bought the sinister double bed and various other articles of furniture, went to the Brackenshire Ladies’ Club and ate lunch in the company of three of Bolivia’s friends with whom she had obviously no more in common than they had with her. One was short, bottle-shouldered, bespectacled, and apparently inclined to literature and Communism; another was shrill, blonde, flirtatious, and at twenty-seven more than a little faded and jaded; and the third was amiable, negative, and inconspicuous beneath the protective coloration of domesticity: but they had all been at school with Bolivia, and she, being anxious to show them her new fiance, had found them correspondingly curious to see him. They made themselves very agreeable to Stephen, flattered him occasionally, frequently deferred to him, and Stephen, though he liked none of them and the cooking was poor, began to enjoy himself. There had been several of these exhibition parties, and he had discovered that his engagement at least bestowed upon him a certain unexpected importance. It might be fleeting, it was probably unsubstantial, but none the less he liked it. An audience, no matter how obtained, was not to be despised, and Stephen could find pleasure in the company of almost anyone who had the grace to listen to him. He felt a certain affection even for Bolivia so long as she let him talk, but though in the early days of their friendship she had been a willing listener, she had become less patient of late, and Stephen’s monologues were restricted to occasions such as the present: he was allowed to be eloquent when his eloquence served the useful purpose of impressing Bolivia’s friends: but not otherwise.

  With Bolivia’s father he continued to be on surprisingly good terms. The General had been greatly taken by Stephen’s unusual, and, as he thought, ironic defence of pacifism; and though he later heard him utter some heterodox opinions about painting, poetry, politics, architecture, and social obligations, his conviction was never shaken that his prospective son-in-law had sound ideas about everything that really mattered. He would introduce Stephen to his elderly cronies – excellent gentlemen with cast-iron convictions and meagre imagination – and tell them that here was a young man whose views on the conduct of war were a credit to him. Whereupon Stephen would repeat his inspired discovery that war was a matter for soldiers only, and that civilians had no claim, call, or title to interfere with it. The implications of this doctrine were never apparent to the General’s friends, who came to share his high opinion of Stephen; with the result that Stephen was offered a commission in the Brackenshire Territorials, and invited to address a meeting of Junior Imperialists. But these triumphs of mockery, and the brief interest of Bolivia’s friends, were the only compensations his engagement offered; and their inadequacy can hardly be denied.

  The wedding was to be celebrated two days before Christmas. Despite her anxiety to be married as soon as possible, Bolivia had found it impossible to complete her arrangements for an earlier date. The alterations at Mulberry Acre, opposed as they were at every step by Stephen, or Wilfrid, or Mrs Barrow, took longer than she had thought; and the purchase of a trousseau was also unexpectedly slow, for confronted with a luxurious range of wedding garments Bolivia revealed a sudden passion for clothes that delayed her choice and multiplied her desires; and, as a final obstacle, Mrs Ramboise refused to come home before the twenty-first of December. Though loathing the English winter, a motive obscurely pious always drove her to abandon Bordighera, Cannes, Mentone, or wherever she might be at the time, in order to spend Christmas at home. But she never stayed for more than a few days, and she wrote to Bolivia, quite sensibly and pleasantly, ‘I very much hope to see your wedding, but I have no intention of making a second journey, in the depths of winter, for that purpose, nor of staying in Lammiter for more than a week. If, then, you want me to be there – and I expect you do – you will have to be married between the 21st and the 28th of December, or put it off till May.’ All these circumstances combined to fix the twenty-third as the wedding-day; and to Stephen the thought of Christmas grew horrible beyond words.

  Two days before the wedding Hilary gave a dinnerparty at Rumneys. It was a family affair. Hilary sat at the head of the long table, on her right was Stephen, next to him Bolivia, then Arthur, Mrs Ramboise – who had reached home the night before – and Mr Peabody. On Hilary’s left were General Ramboise, Daisy, Wilfrid, Katherine, and Sir Gervase Flood, who had been invited as a complement to the General. At the foot of the table, between Sir Gervase and Mr Peabody, sat Jane, looking enormous in a white taffeta frock so voluminously frilled, fluted, flounced, and scalloped that she might have been tarred and feathered: but thickly feathered, closely feathered: the tar was invisible, yet the feathers, the white flocculence, the hispid fringes, must have had something to stick to.

  Hilary was relieved when she got them all seated, for the previous conversation had been embarrassingly dominated by Mrs Ramboise’s narrative of an uneventful afternoon at the bridge-table. Stephen and Bolivia were the guests of the evening, and in Hilary’s opinion they should have been the centre of attraction, and their affairs the principal topic of discussion. Sir Gervase and the General had done their best, making a number of appropriate observations in a bluff and humorous vein; Arthur had confided to Bolivia his belief that domesticity was the true crown and purpose of a woman’s life; and Daisy and Katherine, in the intervals of jealously regarding each other’s figure, had made some pleasant remarks about wedding-presents and the like. But Mrs Ramboise – she had had ten minutes’ conversation with Stephen in the early afternoon, before going to the bridge-party, when, greeting him without emotion, she had said, ‘So you’re going to marry my girl, are you? Well, marriage is a gamble at the best, but it’s no use trying to prevent people gambling. It’s in their blood. And Bolivia’s old enough to know her own mind by now. It’s a pity you’re not in the Navy: that would have given you a better chance. A husband and wife generally get on better if they’re separated for eight or ten months in the year. But there’s no use wishing for that now, and I’m not going to say anything to discourage you. I expect you’ll be as happy as most people are, so long as you don’t let Bolivia bully you. Keep her under your thumb, that’s my advice.’ – Mrs Ramboise, breaking in upon the epithalamic chatter, had loudly demanded, ‘Are we going to have any bridge after dinner? I had the filthiest time this afternoon I’ve ever had in my life: not a partner with a grain of sense, not an opponent with an ounce of grit. In the very first hand the dealer opened with One Diamond, and I’d a strong two-suiter – five spades to the Ace, King, Knave, and five hearts to the Ace, Queen – so naturally I made a skip bid and called Two Spades. Well, what d’you think happened?’

  Attention was partly deflected by the entrance of Mr Peabody, and Mrs Ramboise continued her narrative to a diminished audience. Hilary ventured to interrupt, in order to introduce the newcomer. ‘How d’you do?’ said Mrs Ramboise with obvious resentm
ent, and concluded her story in a voice of unrestrained savagery: ‘So I said to her, “Don’t you know that a Jump Overcall’s a strength-showing bid? Don’t you know the difference between a strength-showing bid and a pre-emptive overbid? Have you read your Culbertson or haven’t you?”’

  ‘And had she?’ asked Wilfrid.

  ‘Pah!’ said Mrs Ramboise.

  Daisy whispered to Wilfrid: ‘What is a Culbertson?’

  ‘Oh, Daisy!’ cried Wilfrid. ‘What a lovely thing to ask! You are being sweet.’

  Mr Peabody finished his glass of sherry, and Hilary led the way to the dining-room. She was sorry for Mr Peabody, who was sitting next to Mrs Ramboise; but it was too late to do anything about that now, and the general spectacle reassured her. Tall glasses reflected the light, the flowers were good, the silver shone. A dinner-table, hedged by guests, was a lovely sight, she thought; and hospitality, once a virtue, had now become a chief grace of life. And the dinner was going to be a good one: clear soup that was clear as sherry, and rich as stock and steak and sherry could make it; lobster vol-au-vent, for which the cook had fingers deft as a card-sharper’s, and the knack of imprisoning the sea’s flavour as cleverly as a shell; cutlets that were to the sheep from which they came as dainty lyrics inset in solid drama; a turkey, white and massive, with a host of little sausages about it like putti round a Rubens goddess; exuberant meringues; and for a savoury soft roes in bacon. An excellent dinner, thought Hilary complacently: a little heavy, perhaps, but it was Christmas time as well as wedding-time, and most of her guests had hearty appetites at any time. It was a pity that Lionel could not be there to share it, for he appreciated a good table and a clever kitchen as well as any man.

  As though influenced by her thought – but this was unlikely, for he took pride in thinking for himself – General Ramboise asked what news there was of the Vicar.

  ‘I’m worried about him,’ said Hilary. ‘He’s getting on very well in a way, and he’s certainly much better, but he’s behaving rather strangely. I went to see him the other day and he asked me if I’d ever read Karl Marx.’

  ‘Good God!’ said the General.

  ‘He was very worried because Marx apparently says that the proletariat are bound to turn on their masters and overthrow them – a sort of natural law, like steam and that sort of thing – though that seems silly to me, because there’s no reason to suppose every working-man’s going to think what Marx thought, or do what he says they ought to do.’

  ‘It’s all a pack of nonsense,’ said the General. ‘I don’t know what’s gone wrong with Purefoy, if he’s worrying about stuff like that.’

  ‘He’d never actually read any Marx before,’ said Hilary, ‘so it came as a shock to him.’

  ‘It didn’t come as a shock to me,’ said the General. ‘I read the fellow twenty years ago, and I saw at once what it was: a pack of seditious nonsense. So I chucked the book away, and I’ve never thought about it since. How did Purefoy get hold of it?’

  ‘Rupert sent it to him.’

  ‘That boy of his?’

  ‘Yes. He’s a Communist, or pretends to be, and I think he must be trying to convert his father.’

  ‘But, good God,’ said the General, ‘he’s at Tugborough, isn’t he? There can’t be any Communists there.’

  ‘There’s quite a lot, according to Rupert. And Denis, who’s a Fascist, says there are just as many of them.’

  ‘Well, I’m damned,’ said the General. ‘I don’t know what the school’s coming to.’

  Any reflections upon the declining respectability of his old school were cut short by an outburst from the other end of the table where Mrs Ramboise had unfortunately discovered a sympathetic listener in Mr Peabody. Her voice, hard and resonant, demanded with sudden indignation, ‘And do you know what she’d the impudence to say? She said she thought an overcall in your opponent’s suit meant a Slam try to show no losers!’

  ‘Too bad,’ murmured Mr Peabody, ‘too bad indeed.’

  ‘So far as a woman like that’s concerned, Culbertson might never have existed!’

  ‘I know, I know,’ said Mr Peabody. ‘It’s really dreadful.’

  ‘Well, I told her the facts. I said my overcall, coming as it did, was equivalent to a strong Take-out Double with a freak, and Culbertson himself says that’s one of the most beautiful inferential bids in Contract. Beautiful, that’s his word. And who’s going to contradict Culbertson?’

  Hilary turned to ask Stephen if the reconditioning of Mulberry Acre was now complete. But Stephen, already patently nervous and ill at ease, had been seriously shaken by the ringing brutality of Mrs Ramboise’s observations, and at the sound of Hilary’s voice, so close beside him, he started convulsively and knocked over a tall hock glass.

  ‘Oh!’ cried Daisy. ‘I hope that doesn’t mean bad luck.’

  ‘Why should it?’ asked Katherine.

  ‘Well,’ said Daisy, ‘I remember being at a dinner-party once, and a glass broke on the table without anyone having touched it, and the following day we read in the paper that Foch was dead. Or was it Arnold Bennett? No, I think it was Foch. At any rate it was somebody very well known.’

  A puzzled silence followed.

  ‘And that isn’t all,’ Daisy continued, ‘because a long time ago, before we were married, I happened to pick up a butter-dish one day, and it simply flew into a thousand pieces. A thousand pieces!’

  ‘And who was dead that time?’ asked Jane in a sepulchral tone.

  ‘My eldest brother,’ said Daisy simply. ‘A cable came from Australia the very next day to say he’d died suddenly by falling out of a window.’

  Again there was a brief silence.

  With a prim little gesture of renunciation Daisy refused the cutlet. Katherine took two, and said boisterously, ‘I’m as hungry as a hunter. My appetite gets better every day.’

  Daisy, pleased both by her superior delicacy and her psychic anecdotes, sat with a small cold smile on her face. Hilary said to Bolivia, ‘Do you think Stephen will learn to ski at Lauterbrunnen?’

  They had arranged to go to Switzerland for their honeymoon.

  ‘I expect he’ll tumble about a bit,’ said Bolivia, ‘but I’ll look after him all right.’

  ‘Oh, you musn’t get hurt, Stephen!’ cried Wilfrid.

  ‘I don’t suppose Stephen will mind taking a knock or two,’ said the General.

  Sir Gervase, who had been talking to Jane about shikar grunted complacently.’ I broke every bone in my body when I was a young man,’ he said.

  ‘Whatever for?’ asked Daisy.

  Wilfrid giggled, and Katherine said proudly, ‘Oliver got a greenstick fracture of his collar-bone playing polo last year.’

  Stephen shifted uneasily in his chair. The mere prospect of honeymooning with Bolivia made him miserably unhappy, while the thought of being compelled to slide down precipitous slopes on vast unmanageable skis – that would assuredly trip him up, and dislocate his joints, and hit him on the back of his head – filled him with terror. And now, hearing these people talk so glibly, so heartlessly, about serious accidents, he trembled in impotent fury. The succulent turkey became sawdust in his mouth, and champagne turned to vinegar.

  The General leaned forward and shouted down the table to Sir Gervase, ‘Did I ever tell you Stephen’s ideas about the next war? That the Army must control everything, and the politicians and civilians will have to do what we tell ’em?’

  ‘Yes, I think you did,’ said Sir Gervase. ‘Very interesting indeed.’

  ‘I said nothing of the kind,’ snapped Stephen.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked the General.

  Stephen muttered, ‘What I meant was that war is so stupid a thing that only people as stupid as soldiers should have anything to do with it.’

  Fortunately the General did not properly hear this outrageous remark, but he caught the word ‘stupid’, and indignation, occluding his veins, empurpled his face and lit the yellow striae in his eyes.

&nbs
p; Bolivia, with opportune good sense, laughed heartily and proclaimed, ‘There’s no use expecting Stephen to say anything sensible tonight. He’s got stage-fright - haven’t you, darling? – and I only hope he gets over it before Saturday. I don’t want him to panic at the church door.’

  Her laughter was loud and jovial, but the glance she flashed at Stephen was hard and threatening. ‘Sit up and don’t look like a fool,’ she whispered fiercely.

  The situation was saved by a great chattering of female voices, a chorus of inconsequent and protective comment upon anything at all and nothing in particular. Hilary and Daisy, Katherine and Jane, aware of discord in the air, sensitive to the General’s displeasure, to Bolivia’s anxiety, and to Stephen’s danger, all began to talk with great zest on a variety of harmless topics, and their voices raised a screen behind which the crisis peacefully expired. Then, with obvious relief, the barrage slackened and ceased; and Mrs Ramboise, who had remained aloof from the pother, was heard to say, ‘A bluff One No-Trump overcall without a stopper in the bid suit; simple and absolutely effective!’

  ‘Culbertson agrees, I think,’ said Mr Peabody.

  ‘Culbertson states the case,’ said Mrs Ramboise decisively.

  Chapter 12

  As soon as the ladies had withdrawn Wilfrid came round and sat beside Stephen. ‘Christmas is going to be perfectly hateful this year,’ he said with a sigh.

  ‘It’s going to be worse for me than for you,’ said Stephen.

  Arthur helped himself to brandy. The glass was of the generous balloon shape, and held a lot. Arthur took handsome advantage of its capacity. Before Daisy’s watchful eyes he had been compelled, throughout dinner, to let the wine pass him by, and now he was naturally eager to make up for lost time. He gulped the brandy as though Bisquit Dubouché, nearly sixty years old, were meant to quench a man’s thirst. It quenched, more happily and almost immediately, his sense of reality. He set his elbows on the table and leaned forward to listen to the General and Sir Gervase. This was the kind of company he preferred above all other. A soldier and a proconsul! Arthur felt the twin flames of war and imperialism warm his heart. He also had been a soldier. He had helped, if not to build, at least to defend an empire. He waited impatiently for an opportunity to say so.