A Test to Destruction (49 page)

Richard had the morning of Saturday away from the office—the fifth of six Saturday mornings a year given to each of the staff.

Breakfast was to be an hour later than usual, at 9 a.m. It was a sunny morning, free of mist and fog; the south-west wind was blowing. Phillip was up in his room, shaved, washed, dressed, and reading over, with some excitement, what he had written
the night before. Breakfast was not yet ready. Hetty had laid the places in the sitting-room, the french windows of which had been opened by Richard to bring in the warm morning air.

Before going down, Phillip opened the top of his bedroom window, and looking out, saw his father below watching Zippy with a mouse. In the kitchen his mother was putting the hot plates on a tray, the eggs and bacon, a special treat for the two men, being already in the chafing dish.

“I’ll take the tray down for you, Mother. Are the plates wiped underneath?”

“Oh dear, I nearly forgot! Thank you, dear, for reminding me. I’ll just make the tea, and bring down the kettle in a minute. Now where did I put that cloth?”

“Leave it to me. You bring down the tea.” He wiped the plates, then peered into the oven. “That’s where the specks fall from, you know. This oven contains the mural memorials of a thousand cremations.”

“Yes, I’m always trying to find time to scrub it out. Oh, how I miss Mrs. Feeney! She went on working when she had that influenza, you know. And I never went to her funeral! I
would
have one of my bilious attacks at the time, wouldn’t I?”

“She was a lovely person, Mother, she had impeccable manners. I always admired her—no, I took her for granted. Still, we all have to die sometime. I’ll take down the tray now.”

He put it before her place at table, with the silver-plated chafing dish, kept warm by boiling water; and going to the open windows, said “Breakfast is ready, sir.”

“Thank you, old man. I’ll be along in a moment. I want to make sure that the cat does not lose its mouse.”

“Isn’t it dead
yet
?”

Zippy was enjoying itself on the lawn, and Father appeared to be enjoying himself equally. The cat would roll on its back ecstatically, clutching the mouse with its paws; and then, flinging it away, lie still while the mouse ran away for its life. The ‘wee tim’rous beastie’ had got so far as the path below the steps when the cat sprang again and hooked it up in its claws, and was rolling once more upon its back when Hetty appeared at the door.

“Oh,
please
kill it, Dickie!”

“Why?” He looked at her. “May not the cat have its sport?”

“Please
kill it.”

“Why must you always be so sentimental?”

She turned away, with trembling lips. Phillip breathed deeply, to control his own feelings. He tried to think: Did his father gain what his mother lost, as the cat with the mouse? Or did she
thrive
on suffering, as Father had once accused her of doing, ‘like a Christian martyr’? He must try and keep his own feelings in balance, resist feelings of hardness towards Father’s apparent callousness.

The cat bounded away, and when it dropped the mouse on the concrete path leading to the back door he saw it was a short-tailed field-vole, with little white nipples—obviously a female who had young somewhere in a grass-ball nest. Its fur was wet, he could see that its life was ebbing fast; big or little mammal, the feelings of all were basically the same. He clenched his hands as he saw his mother’s face, turning away from the
feld-grau
vole crawling in a slow zig-zag, as though its spine were disjointed.

“Why not kill it, Father, and put Mother out of her misery?” he managed to say.

“Oh come, Phillip! You, a colonel once commanding men, to talk like that!”

The cat rolled on the concrete, watched by Father with what seemed to be simple happiness. Then it squatted on its paws, tail twitching with little jags of lust, watching the vole trying to climb one of the creosoted boards of the fence. While it was hanging there by its paws, a foot from the ground, Mother came back to the open window.

“Oh, do let it go,
please
do, Dickie! Or kill it——” Her voice was weak.

“It’s sport for the cat!” repeated Richard. “It’s the cat’s nature.”

“Oh, I cannot bear it,” she said, and went away again.

Phillip followed her into the house, his breathing restricted, his father’s voice calling after him “Your mother didn’t object to eating those birds you brought home from the Husborne shoot, did she? The fact is, your mother takes every opportunity to object to what I do, or if it isn’t what I do, it’s how I do it!” Then almost amorously to the cat, “Poo-or Zippy! Would they take away your mousie then, poo-oor Zippy.” He bent to tickle the cat’s stomach, drawing back his hand from the claws. “Naughty, Zippy!”

The cat sprang up, then meeow’d weakly at its master, blinking eyes when Richard half playfully, half angrily, cuffed its head.

Phillip went away from the window to the front room, where he saw his mother sitting in her armchair, her eyes bright with unshed tears, her cheeks faintly flushed, her body seeming smaller than when last he had seen her sitting there, in what was supposed to be her very own chair. He had seldom seen her in it, and never when the children had been in the front room on Sunday afternoons, for usually he and Mavis had made a rush for it.

“Phillip, I can’t bear it any longer! I have my nervous headaches almost constantly now.”

“I know how you feel. I often feel just the same myself. Father doesn’t understand. We all fail to understand one another, it seems. Look how beastly I was to you when Desmond and I came back from Folkestone that day.”

“I was afraid you were going to ruin your life, Phillip.”

“I know, Mother. But it is not always good to interfere. Yet I understand, Mother, how you felt.”

“Thank you for saying it, Phillip.”

He stroked her forehead with his fingers, the first sign of affection he had ever given her; she took his hand, and pressed it to her bosom; and felt his movement to withdraw it. To cover her feeling she said, “Do you see where I’ve put your Order, Phillip? Under that glass dome, where the waxed fruits used to stand? It looks so beautiful, oh I am so proud of it. One day you will want to give it to your wife; until then, I’ll keep it for you.”

“Oh, Mother——”

Seeing his face, she went on, “Are you sure you feel all right, Phillip?” She thought she must not talk about the war. “I expect you want your breakfast. Oh dear, I hope I have not let the plates get cold! It’s silly of me to be so upset over a mouse, isn’t it?”

“It’s not silliness, Mother. It was the same feeling for which Father Aloysius lost his life on the Somme. Father does not understand about the war,” he muttered. He wanted to be alone. “I don’t think I could eat breakfast, thank you.”

“Oh do try and eat something, dear. If you don’t, it may upset Father, and he is so looking forward to his little holiday.”

“Yes, I understand, Mother.”

The next day, Sunday the 9th of November—first anniversary of the Red Revolution in Germany—was one to be remembered in the Maddison family for the rest of the members’ lives. It began much as usual, all discordance subdued until, at mid-day dinner, as Richard was about to carve a half-shoulder of ex-frozen Australian sheep he saw a black speck on the top plate. Putting the plate on one side, he pointed to another example of his wife’s carelessness: a trace of dried mustard remaining on the rim of the second plate from a previous meal.

“Who brought in these plates from the kitchen, I would like to ask?”

“I did,” said Doris.

“Oh, it is all my fault,” said Hetty, “I really must get some glasses.”

“Why cannot Doris do the washing up, pray? Or does she, too, need spectacles?”

“Doris has so much to do, Dickie—she is working very hard for her degree——”

Phillip carried the plates back to the kitchen, followed by his mother, while Richard sat behind the cooling week’s ration of meat, obstinately determined to punish himself and all concerned by refusing to allow it to go back into the oven.

“It’s no good, Phillip, I try to please your father but everything I do upsets him. I can’t go on any more,” said Hetty, behind the closed door.

“Come on, let’s get the plates clean. Give me that kettle of hot water. You dry, Doris. Now, Mother, you should never think in terms of
pleasing
anyone.”

“Hear hear,” said Doris. “Father isn’t worth it.”

“I said,
anyone.
It’s wrong primarily to
try
to please people.”

“Mother isn’t so selfish as you,” remarked Elizabeth, who had followed her sister out of the dining-room.

“What I mean is, one should put the job first, Mum. That way one becomes an artist.”

“Oh yes! Hark at you!” said Elizabeth. “That’s what you think you are, don’t you? Putting all those ink-blots on Father’s card table upstairs, while waiting for inspiration! Just you wait till he sees what you’ve done! And why don’t you go to bed before he does? It worries him, and that affects Mother.”

“I walk at night, to get some peace and quiet for my writing, if you must know.”

“Is that why you wear that yellow tie, to be seen in the dark? People in Wakenham laugh at you, do you know that? You and Julian Warbeck—both of you going to be great writers, I don’t think!”

“Have you been telling people about my writing? I wish you would mind your own business!” He peered into the oven.

“As I said, it’s coated with the effects of many a burnt offering, I’ll scour it out tomorrow. Make way, Elizabeth!” as he hastened out of the kitchen with the plates.

Feeling easier by his son’s moral support, Richard went on with the cutting—the art of carving, he remarked, was in abeyance until rationing was ended. At last all were served; knives and forks taken up; cat in position beside the master’s chair. The meat was not so tough and tasteless as he had feared.

“You may not long remain the only member of the family to be entitled to wear a medal, Phillip,” he said, amiably. “Perhaps you have read in the paper that they are talking of giving the Victory Medal to the Special Constabulary?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t time to read the papers, Father.”

“Oh! I should have thought that a gentleman of leisure like yourself would have all the time in the world.”

“Now you come to mention it, sir, I think I did read somewhere that the Birmingham City Ironmongers have struck a Water Guard Medal, for helping to guard the City water supply ‘from malicious interference and contamination by enemy agents’—smoke from the profiteers’ factory chimneys a possibly. It has a
moire,
or pale blue riband, I understand, and an inscription, ‘Brummagem contra mundum.’”

“Ah, no doubt you are feeling very superior, Phillip! Well, while I do not know about Birmingham, I do know that guarding anything in the war called for constant vigilance, especially during the long hours of darkness.”

“Ah yes, spies signalling to Zeppelins, and all that sort of thing,” replied Phillip with a straight face.

“Well, they did, you know! They had many ingenious ways of giving information to their masters in the Wilhelmstrasse.”

“I suppose German spies could have signalled the whereabouts of the water by placing dead fish at the side of the reservoir, revealing a phosphorescent perimeter?”

Hetty laughed. Phillip’s grave manner reminded her of her brother Hugh. But he must not go too far——

“So you still take this spy business lightly, I see! Well, I can assure you that the high authorities, who presumably knew what they were doing, took quite a different attitude.”

“‘The high authorities’—the ‘Frocks’—save us from ‘high authorities,’ Father. The Fifth Army was nearly obliterated because Lloyd George and Co. refused to send out sufficient reinforcements in January 1918, to the B.E.F., until it was almost too late. We were starved of troops, which were deliberately kept at home, a million and a half, although it was known what was coming. Perhaps Lloyd George will get the V.C. for that, as well as the Birmingham Water Guard Medal!”

“I hold no brief for Lloyd George, Phillip, but according to the House of Commons debate in May, following the German break-through——”

“The Germans didn’t break through, Father——”

“As I was saying, I seem to remember reading in the paper that the Prime Minister refuted what you now say, by giving the figures supplied by the head of the War Office, General Maurice, who wrote that letter to
The
Times.
As I said, I hold no brief for ‘Loud Jaws,’ but when he quoted General Maurice’s own figures, given by General Maurice himself, to the Cabinet
before
the debate in the House of Commons, his whole case, prompted by Asquith and others, collapsed. For the figures given to the Cabinet proved that there were nearly a quarter of a million more men in France at the beginning of 1918, than there were at the corresponding time in 1917.”

“Well, Father, that simply isn’t true!”

“Of course, if
you
know better than the Government, there’s nothing more to be said!”

“Well, I do know a little about it, Father. At the beginning of 1917 all our infantry brigades were composed of four battalions. Every infantry brigade in the B.E.F. in January 1918 was cut down to three battalions, the fourth battalion being disbanded to feed the other three. Even then, most battalions were far under strength, while a million and a half men were kept back in England. They were withheld because Mr. George wanted to get rid of Haig. The war was very nearly lost owing to the vindictiveness of an outsider for a soldier and gentleman.”

“Well, I suppose that settles the matter? You know more than the authorities!”

“The civilian mind invented propaganda, Father, so it is quite capable of faking information from the War Office. What General Maurice said was this: The Prime Minister read to the House of Commons a wrong set of figures, the first set that Maurice had sent him. General Maurice sent a corrected set of figures before the debate, but Lloyd George quoted the first set. He must have deliberately suppressed the second set.”

“I can tell you one thing, Phillip, and that is that Lloyd George is going to lose us the peace, in my opinion!” Richard went on vehemently, “I tell you that we should have gone on with the war until we had got to Germany, to give them a taste of what they have given France! In yesterday’s
Trident
there is an account of para-military forces being assembled in Berlin, to march through the streets—tens of thousands of them!—with bands and flags, defying the Occupation authorities! ‘They will cheat you yet, those Junkers!’, as Castleton is always trying to drive home to us. I tell you that we should not have agreed to an Armistice a year ago, but finished the destruction of Prussian militarism once and for all!”