A Difficult Young Man (19 page)

A few days later I wrote to my parents the letter I have mentioned:

‘Dear Mummy and Dad,

‘If you knew how I was suffering you couldn't possibly enjoy yourselves. I am filthy. The bathwater is only heated on
Saturdays
!!!
The food is terrible because it's Lent, and it was awful before anyhow. I
go over to the house when I can and have a good blow-out with Mrs Watts in the kitchen. If you don't send for me soon you will be absolutely
revolted
when you do see me. My table manners are disgusting as I wolf my food with ravenous hunger. You say you mustn't interrupt my education, but what good is learning in a corpse I ask you when I've died of pneumonia. I hope you are winning a lot of money as I am pining for luxury and high living. Please come home. Please send for me. Do something for Goodness Sake. Send for me and I will fly to you like a swallow flying south. Please do. I am fluting a wild carol ere my death. Save me for my namesake as I
am

‘Your loving son,

‘G
UY
L
ANGTON
.'

This communication, which Laura kept for thirty years, marking the envelope in the corner, ‘Written to us from the Vicarage when we were at Nice,' had more effect than I expected, as they did send for me.

Laura wrote that Brian and I were to join them at Arles at the beginning of April, thinking I was still too young to travel alone in a foreign country. Brian,
however, was in love with a girl at the Slade, whom he was unwilling to leave, even for a fortnight in Provence, though he pleaded the excuse of an ‘important' portrait he was doing, which was in fact of this girl. He told Dominic, who volunteered eagerly to take his place. Laura expressed some uneasiness at his leaving Sylvia to go off on an unnecessary holiday. Dominic replied that he would only miss two week-ends at Dilton, though a few months earlier he would have thought this out of the question.

At Victoria Station there happened an incident which was very much in keeping with Dominic's ‘life-style.' We were standing on the platform, and nearby a woman was talking to a man whose luggage was in our compartment. The train was about to start and the man got in. Dominic immediately smouldered with disapproval at his entering before his wife, and with great deliberation stood aside for her. She said: ‘Oh, no,' but he replied ‘Please.' She gaped at him, and hypnotized by the powerful magnetism of his courtesy, she entered the train. We followed and a porter slammed the door.

‘But I'm not going!' the woman explained, which was untrue as the train had already started. She had only been seeing her husband off, but she was whisked down to Folkestone where perhaps she spent a pleasant and unlooked-for day by the sea, though all the way down she talked of a cake she had left in the oven. His mistaken politeness did not put Dominic in a very good mood. When we were dining at the Gare du Lyon,
before catching the train to the south, he said to me, as if it were an unimportant matter that had just occurred to him:

‘Don't tell Helena about that woman at Victoria.'

In the morning when we arrived at the hotel at Arles I went straight up to my parents' room. They were sitting up in bed eating croissants and they looked at me with some amusement. When Laura had kissed me, she asked:

‘How's your pneumonia, darling?'

‘You don't look very squalid,' said Steven. ‘Superficially dirty, but not grimed in.'

‘Have you made a lot of money?' I asked.

‘No, I put ten francs on zero and lost it.'

‘Did you meet some dukes?'

‘No, only a Russian baroness and your mother wouldn't let me speak to her.'

‘You haven't been very worldly,' I said. They smiled and sent me off to find my room and to have a bath if obtainable.

When I came down all the rest of the party were sitting in an otherwise deserted dining-room, where most of the chairs were stacked so that the place could be cleaned. A sulky waiter attended to them, as it would have been much easier to send them up trays, but Uncle Bertie would not hear of his family having breakfast in their rooms unless they were at the point of death. Aunt Maysie kissed me and Aunt Baba said ‘Hullo, Guy,' in a bright offhand manner, untainted with any
of the dowdiness of family affection. Dominic was sitting beside Helena. As he was engaged, and when our parents had last seen him, intoxicated by his love for Sylvia, it was now considered safe for them to meet. He looked as if he had come up into the air to breathe, lighter and more cheerful than I had seen him for some time. I felt like that myself, as it was pleasant to be with the family again and to hear their familiar talk. They were discussing whether they should attend a bullfight in the arena the next day.

Uncle Bertie was extremely Protestant, and shocked by the marriage of Princess Ena to the King of Spain.

‘Whatever Princess Ena may do, my daughter shall never witness a bullfight,' he said.

‘I think we ought to see everything,' said Baba.

‘Well, I've come over here to enjoy myself,' said Aunt Maysie, who, although the richest of the family, had never been to Europe before. ‘So far it's only been Roman Catholics and having breakfast in the wash-house.' The sulky waiter was now swilling the tiled floor around our feet. ‘And I'm blowed if I'm going to spend an afternoon in the abattoir.' She was so fond of her two sons, and thought of them so much when they were separated, that she unconsciously used their idiom.

Everyone laughed, as we generally did at Aunt Maysie, but Uncle George said:

‘Actually this thing tomorrow isn't a bullfight. Nothing is killed and there are no horses involved. The men have to dodge the bull, and pluck a rosette or
something from between its horns. It's a sort of game of tig, and you could take a child to see it. I saw one when we were down here with Mama in the nineties. It's quite amusing.'

As this was only to be a kind of ‘High Church,' not a ‘Catholic' bullfight, as it were the ritual without the doctrine, it was decided that we should all go, even Uncle Bertie. Steven and Laura appeared just then, and we went along to book seats, which we obtained in the front row. All that day and the morning of the next we strolled about the lovely old town, like a fragment of Rome. Aunt Maysie was funny about foreign parts, and Aunt Baba was busy registering facts about the antiquities which she thought would be useful to her in Melbourne Society. On the second day, as the weather was fine and there was no mistral, we had luncheon in the sun, sitting at tables in the street, and there was a lot of white wine. When it was time to go to the arena Steven said: ‘I'm in a drunken stupor and I don't want to look at bulls. I'm going back to the hotel to sleep.' Laura went with him but the rest of us went off to the arena. My sensitive Gothic soul, still in its moments of tranquility dreaming of sandalled feet on the scrubbed floors of convents, and strong monastic necks emerging from white cowls as the pistils from arum lilies, was repelled by the excited crowd in which we became wedged at the entrance to the arena, and I thought that the women in their Arlesienne caps looked like very bold parlour-maids.

They ogled Dominic, and even me as they pushed against us. I did not like the smell or aura of the crowd, but this may only have been due to garlic, and the arena was a dazzling sight in the sunshine, with the tiers filled with a thousand dots of life.

Dominic, unlike myself, seemed to expand with pleasure and to give himself up to the general excitement in a way I had never seen before. Usually he gave the impression of being withdrawn from the crowd. When we were seated, as he looked about him, his eyes were alive with excitement, especially as he examined the arrangements of the arena, and the arch through which the bull would enter. Round the sides, a yard or two from the wall where the tiers began, was a wooden fence to provide a refuge for the men baiting the bull when their situation became too dangerous. When the bull came in and the sport began, the men in their white clothes dodging round the infuriated animal, Dominic leant forward as far as he could. He sat perfectly still, except for his eyes, which followed every leap of the men, every dash of the bull. One man had his trousers ripped and on the thigh of another appeared a thin red line of blood. Helena sat beside him, and her eyes were as intent as his own, but with a half-amused expression, whereas Dominic looked utterly serious in his absorption.

I am afraid that I did not enjoy it very much. I disliked excited crowds, and thought it wrong to tease
animals, even if one did not kill them. I watched with a certain fascination, but with the priggish feeling that everyone should know better, so that apart from the moment of drama, which centred on our little foreign group, and stamped itself on my mind with dreadful sharpness, I was only aware of a background of shimmering, pulsating, shouting life.

Dominic's action may have been due to his own excitement, or to the presence of Helena beside him. He suddenly leapt down into the safety passage and climbed the wooden fence into the ring. There was a shout from the people near us, whether of admiration for his courage or anger at his intrusion was not clear. He stayed there for what seemed about five minutes, but which may have been less. He told me afterwards that he wanted to get the rosette for Helena. In the midst of my dismay I had a glimpse of her face. She was watching him with sparkling pride and admiration. Then the bull came charging towards our side of the ring, and all the bull-baiters, or whatever they were called, including Dominic, scrambled over the wooden barrier to safety, as they thought. But the bull charged the barrier, smashed it, and came pounding along the safety corridor. Dominic, just below us, was directly in its path.

Now I come to the most improbable thing I have to record in this book. To clothe it in a thick wrapping of explanation will not make it any more acceptable, so
I had better state it bluntly. Aunt Baba tried to murder Dominic. At least that was how it appeared to me. He scrambled up and grabbed the top of the wall. As his hand appeared, with an unsteady grip, opposite where she was seated between Uncle George and myself, she stood up and pushed it away, so that he would fall back into the path of the bull. Uncle George at the same time leaned over, and seizing his arm above the elbow, yanked him up into safety. Shouts and yells were going on all around us. Dominic, heated in body and mind, said to Baba with the same air of haughty accusation he had used to Sylvia, when she had refused to dance with Alec Hancock:

‘Why did you push my hand from the wall? I might have been killed.' But he had no idea that her action was deliberate. Only I thought that, and, I believe, Uncle George, who had seen her face.

Baba had always hated Dominic, more for his good qualities than for his bad. She hated his liability to throw away an advantage because of some principle of religion or obligation of nobility, as it was an implied criticism of her own sordid
arrivisme
. She hated the gentleness and warmth of feelings of which he was capable, and above all she hated the embarrassment he could cause her, as he had done at their very first meeting, when he had given her those satirical, as she imagined, white flowers. Now he had caused her more than embarrassment—acute fear, which is the chief, perhaps the only cause of hatred. She had
no knowledge of foreign countries, she felt nervous amongst the lively, black-eyed Provençals, and thought they all wore concealed daggers, and she was terrified at the shout that went up when Dominic leapt into the ring, believing it was hostile to us. She thought that the angry mob might turn on us, and may even have had a confused idea that if Dominic were killed the anger of the crowd would be appeased. Probably she did not think at all, and merely wanted to be dissociated from the whole incident, but Dominic chose to climb back almost into her lap, and moved by some inner compulsion, uncontrolled by the mind, she pushed him away. So perhaps it is not true to say that she tried to murder him, but certainly her face was horrible to look at, and she was not normally bad-looking. Those three faces, Baba's frightened and vicious, Dominic's indignant, and George's incredulous, are what remained, large and sharply etched against the colour and noise of the day.

The rest of our party were aware that something had happened, but did not know what as George and I, standing up, had obscured their view. Also they were too excited by Dominic's whole escapade to give attention to a momentary detail which they did not see. The last thing to enter their minds would be the idea that Baba might deliberately push Dominic back to be gored by a bull. In reply to his accusation she said:

‘I was trying to catch hold of your hand,' but her voice shook and she may already have been horrified at her instinctive action.

When we arrived back Steven and Laura were seated outside the hotel, drinking that straw-flavoured hot water which was the only tea obtainable in France in those days.

‘Well,' asked Steven, ‘are you all glutted with blood?' Then he saw from our expressions that something had happened, and asked what was the matter.

‘Dominic jumped into the bullring,' said Aunt Maysie, and she nodded her head as Alice used to do when anything bothered her.

‘Good God!' exclaimed Steven. He and Laura looked at Dominic, their faces suddenly puffy with worry. He did not ask why he did it as he had long ago given up asking why Dominic did anything.

‘It was a very good performance,' said Uncle George, reassuringly.

‘The bull nearly got him,' I volunteered cheerfully.

‘Rot!' said Dominic.

‘Why, you told Aunt Baba it nearly got you,' I protested.

‘I said it would have if I had fallen backwards,' he replied, ‘but I didn't fall backwards.'

Baba went into the hotel. The others ordered more of the nasty tea, and Dominic and Helena strolled off to walk along the banks of the Rhone.

‘Why did you say the bull nearly got him?' Laura asked me.