by James Hilton
“Perhaps, though, the relatives of the people who were killed there might still think it mattered.”
“Oh, THEM. I wasn’t thinking about THEM.”
And she wasn’t. She was just thinking of herself and Jeffrey. That seemed to close the argument quite finally. I got up and made it clear that there was nothing more I could say or do.
During the next few weeks I found myself thinking even more compellingly about the Winslows. First, HE had interested me, then she; but now my interest in each of them separately was more than redoubled in them both. What went on between such a pair? What sort of thing was their life together? If she had been lying on his behalf, it was possible that the appalling selfishness of her argument might not have been sincere. Or had she been telling the truth, both as to fact and attitude? To summarize it another way: if she were a liar, one liked her better and her husband less; but if she were not a liar, one disliked her intensely and felt sympathy for her husband. And I still could not properly make up my mind. I have rarely been so puzzled about anything. Then suddenly more evidence filtered through —I needn’t go into details, but it was of a kind that weighed down one of the scales pretty conclusively. She HAD told the truth. She HAD intercepted the message. Which meant that Jeffrey himself was neither a liar nor a coward, but at worst a victim.
The revelation swung me into a mood in which I recollected our meeting and how much, from first appearance, I had liked him. I remembered his quietness, his austere dignity, the simple unassumingness which, I knew, concealed a mind whose quality had been demonstrated. So on impulse I wrote him a friendly letter, saying nothing much except that I hoped he was getting on all right and that if he ever visited London he might find time to have lunch with me. To my surprise he answered by return and took the invitation with far more seriousness than I should have thought. He would have been so glad, he said, to come to London and see me (I hadn’t suggested that, by any means), but he was not very well and couldn’t get away… would I, however, visit him in Ireland—stay a week or two—there was good shooting, fishing, climbing, if that sort of thing appealed to me? He would be very happy, and please make it soon, because the late summer (and it was then August) was perhaps the best time of the year at Carrigole.
It happened that I had not had a holiday that year, and though the idea of visiting the Winslows seemed quite fantastic at first, I soon found myself thinking of reasons why I might take Jeffrey at his word. After all, I liked him; it might even be that if he were feeling low-spirited I could help him by talk and companionship. But I will not disguise that my overmastering motive was sheer curiosity. I wanted to find out what sort of people they both were, in their own home and with their own domestic problems. And at least it could do no harm to call on them if I happened to be holiday-making thereabouts.
So I looked up Carrigole on the map and found it was a dozen miles from Galway—a small place, not very accessible, in a district of lakes and mountains. And that’s why I asked you, Boswell, if you ever knew the Winslows in Ireland, because I should have liked your opinion of Carrigole.
It began to rain when I first came within sight of it. I had hired a car for the last stage of the trip and all the way I felt oddly excited about getting there. Actually I had never been in Ireland before, and crossing the country from Dublin it had occurred to me that even the trains were antique —and not contemptibly, as on so many outdated railways all over the world, but honourably, with dignity, like good sound Victorian mahogany furniture. And when, at Galway, my train reached its destination, there was again the contrast with other rail-heads I had seen; for here was no mere petering out into obscurity, but a grand finale in stone—the massive quayside station, far too large and almost quiet as a cathedral, shaking a granite fist into the sea.
But my first glimpse of Carrigole was equally memorable—or perhaps the mood I was in gave me extra percipience—a kind of mystic awareness I am naturally distrustful of, but can’t deny exists, at certain rare times and places. I knew Ireland was supposed to be like that, and therefore I was perversely surprised to find it so. Through the rainswept windows of the car I saw blue smoke drifting over the roofs of whitewashed cottages, and beyond them a mountain rising into clouds that totally covered the summit. I gathered, from the map on my knee, that this must be Slieve Baragh, not much higher than a hill, yet as I saw it then for the first time it seemed in another world of measurement. Presently the car slowed down for the village, and here the swollen clouds dipped lower, bringing no raindrops but emptying silently; Slieve Baragh was now hidden behind a curtain that suggested Himalayan heights—and yet, I remembered again, it was not much of a mountain—a mere two thousand feet. I couldn’t help making other mental notes of the near and the practical—the uneven walls and mud-brown pavements, the butcher who called himself a ‘flesher’ and the chemist’s shop magnificently styled a ‘Medical Hall’. I wound down the side window to catch the whiff of peat on the wet breeze as the car bumped over a bridge across a river—only a minor river, like the minor mountain, but turbulent now as it filled almost directly from the sky.
A mile or so past the village the Winslows’ house stood behind a drenched garden, and Jeffrey was waiting at the gate in the rain. He looked pale and worn, and there was intense nervousness in the way he greeted me.
I ought to describe the house; it was substantially built, thick- walled and small-windowed, in a style conditioned by roaring Atlantic gales for half the year, and political troubles for half a century. These indeed had left the house with its most conspicuous attribute—a large, burnt-out wing, blackened and roofless, which provided a ready topic of conversation. “They tried to burn the whole place down in ‘twenty-two,” Jeffrey explained. “Livy got it cheap because it hadn’t been lived in since then and needed so much repairing, but part of it’s beyond repair—it would be too large for us, anyway. We have a couple of servants and the boy when he’s home from school—that only makes five…”
By then we were in the square hall, from which the main rooms of the house opened on all sides, and it was there that Livia met me. Perhaps because of the dark afternoon it seemed to me that she appeared from nowhere, a sudden distillation of shadows. I was not surprised when she greeted me as a stranger, allowing Jeffrey to make the unnecessary introduction. I played up accordingly and thought it equally unnecessary when, a few minutes later in the bedroom I had been shown to, she closed the door behind her and said with a sort of conspiratory quietness: “Jeffrey still doesn’t know I came to see you in London.”
I nodded and said I would have surmised that he didn’t.
“And of course he doesn’t know anything else either.”
I knew what she meant, and I nodded to that also.
“I hope you won’t ever repeat what I told you in confidence,” she went on.
I said temporizingly and in the bland way which I have cultivated as part of my official equipment: “My dear Mrs. Winslow, I wasn’t aware that you were telling me anything in confidence, but as a matter of fact I don’t usually gossip.” I added, to change the subject: “It’s so kind of you to have me here, and I hope it isn’t too much trouble.”
“Not at all,” she answered, with cold politeness. “You’re on your way to Limerick, aren’t you?”
That was as broad a hint as I needed, and clear proof of what I had already guessed—that she didn’t want me to stay, and that Jeffrey had invited me either without her knowledge or against her wishes. I had guessed this subconsciously enough to have wired my time of arrival too late for any cancellation of the invitation—and, as it happened, too late even for Jeffrey to meet me at Galway.
“Yes,” I said. “I’m on my way to Limerick.”
I had a bath, changed into drier tweeds, and went down to dinner. I met the boy then, Charles I think his name was—a youth of thirteen, at Charterhouse—tall, good-looking, shy, likable. Intelligent, too, as I discovered after a few casual remarks. He was piling turf on the old-fashioned fire
as I entered, for it was chilly enough to have one, and that set us talking of turf and electricity, old and new, the Shannon hydro-electric scheme and the ancient Irish tongue that nobody spoke except illiterate peasants and modern school teachers. Livia then said: “We’re all half mad with our opposites,” which seemed to end rather than clinch any discussion. She had a curious way of saying things that were never quite clear, yet never so meaningless as to be easy to ignore. Jeffrey noticed my interest in the boy and soon found a chance to tell me, like any other proud father, that Charlie was keen on music and by no means a bad piano-player. We went on chatting desultorily throughout the meal; then the boy made a polite excuse and left us three adults together. I somehow had an impression that he got on better with his father than with Livia, accepting the shy approach more readily than the frontal assault; and it has amused me since to reflect that Livia ranged against the polite taboos of the English public-school system would be a unique example of an irresistible force meeting an immovable body.
After he had gone there was a change of atmosphere that became almost baleful; it had been tense before, but now it was menacing, a curious hostility between Jeffrey and Livia that was due, I could not help feeling, to my own presence. A sort of invisible cat crouching on the table-top to spring at any of our throats at an unknown signal—if the metaphor isn’t too far-fetched. In an attempt to ease the conversation into some harmless groove I said, unimportantly: “It’s probably not a good day to sight-see, but I did at least get a good whiff of Ireland as I drove over.”
Livia answered, as if she must dispute with me at all costs: “It IS a good day to sight-see. Ireland’s a sad country, so you see it best when it looks sad, but the sadness is alive—it comes out of the earth—it isn’t like the dead sadness of London, especially the West End.”
“Oh, come now,” I said facetiously. “The Café Royal at midnight hasn’t got much dead sadness.”
“Jeff and I love it here,” she went on defensively, as if I had ever denied it. “That is, he could if he wanted to,” she added, as if Jeffrey had ever denied it.
“But what do you do all the time?” I asked, still facetiously.
“Livy looks after the farm,” Jeffrey answered. “She likes that sort of work, though it’s not very good land—far too stony, and the gales come in full of salt spray that sours the soil… I’ll take you round tomorrow.”
“Mr. Millbay won’t have time,” Livia said pointedly. “He’s got to leave for Limerick tomorrow.” She added: “Jeffrey’s busy too. He has to write his book.”
“If he can,” Jeffrey commented, with a note of ruefulness.
“He doesn’t concentrate enough,” she countered. They were both talking at each other, it seemed, with me as a needed yet somehow exacerbating audience.
The question of the book raised Jeffrey a notch higher in whatever emotion was being generated between them. “Livy,” he said, “appears to think that writing is just a simple matter of one page after another.”
“Well, isn’t it?” Livia asked, appealing to me.
I tried to lower the tension by asking Jeffrey how far the book had progressed.
Livia answered for him: “About a hundred pages, and it ought to be easy for him to finish because it’s all about Far Eastern affairs that he’s an expert on.”
Jeffrey said, still in the same mood of self-scarifying irony: “Livy thinks that with a record like mine people will be eager to accept me as an authority.”
I gathered that this had been argued between them before, since Livia retorted: “What does his record have to do with what he writes?… That’s what I always ask him.”
Jeffrey nodded. “Yes, that’s what she always asks me, and I think the answer is rather obvious. Wouldn’t you say so, Millbay?”
I didn’t want to get into such an argument, so I said nothing.
Livia went on, as if even my silence irritated her: “And what OF his record, anyway? Who bothers about it except a few people in the Government?”
Jeffrey answered, heavily: “I think Charlie would bother about it if he knew—and perhaps he does know, or can guess.”
“Charlie has no right to be ashamed of his father,” Livia retorted, and then she added astoundingly: “My father spent twelve years in jail and I wasn’t ashamed of HIM.”
I hadn’t known about that, and made up my mind to look into the matter when I got back to London. And of course I afterwards found who her father had been. But in the meantime I felt I had to be honest and side with Jeffrey about the book. He was undoubtedly right, and his Far Eastern opus, however good, might well fall under the curse of Kemalpan—the more so since, if it were very good indeed, it might even attract publicity to what would otherwise have been ignored or forgotten. I didn’t bring up that point, but my general support of Jeffrey’s attitude led to what I had feared—and that was the whole Kemalpan issue spouting up like a volcano. Jeffrey muttered gloomily that he wondered if it were worth while even to finish the book at all, what he really wanted was a job, something he could work at to prove himself more than a failure and an idler. A job, a job… to get away from the everlasting western gales and the stony soured soil and the clouds dripping over the mountain and nothing to do… nothing to do…
I could feel the tension mounting now like a physical wave through the shadows, and again to ease it I said: “You know, Jeffrey, there ARE jobs, if you really want one. It wouldn’t have to be in Government service. Your Far Eastern experience would be a bargain for a good commercial firm, and it’s true, as you know, that a man can serve his country in, say, British-American Tobacco quite as valuably as in an embassy.”
I saw his eyes light up at that. “Do you think they’d even consider me?”
But then a strange and disconcerting thing happened. Livia got up from her chair and leaned across the table towards us with a gleam in her eyes that was of a very different kind. It gave her face a rather frightening radiance, emphasizing the curious profile of nose and forehead as she stared down at us like, I thought, the figurehead of a ship about to dive into a storm. “He’s not going!” she screamed, in a wild angry whisper. “He must stay HERE. This is the place for him… ALWAYS…”
After that there was little I could say. The scene subsided, leaving us to stammer a few commonplaces about this and that; Livia seemed to realize she had said too much, or had somehow been caught off-guard.
We adjourned to the drawing-room and sat up, the three of us, till it became clear that Jeffrey wanted to talk to me alone if there were any chance. Towards midnight I began yawning, to bring the thing to an issue, and Livia said it was time we all went to bed; whereupon Jeffrey announced that he and I would stay up and chat for a while. He said that with an air of challenge, and there was nothing much she could do about it except leave us together. Such a small victory, and yet, from his whole attitude, I gathered it was both a narrow and a crucial one.
When we were alone he asked me again about the possibility of a commercial job—had I meant what I said—did I really think there was a chance of it?—Certainly, I answered, if that was what he really wanted, and I offered there and then to put in a good word for him. But the imminence of something practical and decisive seemed to reverse his mood and deflate his eagerness, so that I told him to think it over carefully; maybe he didn’t want to go as much as he thought he did. He answered, far TOO carefully: “I’d go like a shot but for Livy.”
Then he lapsed into a mumble of pitiful things about her—almost as if he had learned most of them by heart and were repeating them as much for his own benefit as for mine. She would be dead against his going abroad again; she had spent ten years in Malaya and that was understandably as much as she wanted; she loved Ireland and the farm; she worked so hard, was so good to him, they really got on all right together despite occasional bickerings… and so on.
And of course, knowing what I did, it antagonized me to the point of saying: “So you really mean you’ll stay here for the rest of
your life just to please her?”
He answered: “Perhaps I ought to stay here. After all, she’s been very decent about the whole thing. The Kemalpan business, I mean. She’s never reproached me about it.”
That did the trick. Accustomed as I am to the severest verbal self- discipline I simply couldn’t keep back my answer. “By God,” I exclaimed, “she damn well oughtn’t to, since she was the whole cause of it herself!”
Then I told him what I hadn’t promised Livia not to tell him, though I should have broken that promise anyway.
Of course he was appalled. He wouldn’t believe it at first, even when I said I had documents, depositions, and so on, that I could send or show him later. “Besides,” I said, “she confessed to it even before there was proof.” That appalled him also, and I had to tell him about her visit to my office. When he still seemed unable or unwilling to grasp the situation, I said: “You mean you don’t think she’s capable of it?”
