Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (19 page)

He leaned back in his chair and smiled with satisfaction - he had made a confession of an action that troubled his conscience and spiked John's guns at the same time.

John smiled. 'You speak as though I accepted your premises,' he said. 'You probably think that everyone does. I'm all in favour of removing these moral burdens from your conscience. Nationalize you. That's the answer. And when you've done that, watch the national planners - our good friend Pelican and so on - like hell to see that they don't become the same dyspeptic, conscience-racked tyrants as you and your private-enterprise colleagues.' He raised his voice and smiled a little as though to a radio audience. He even underlined the naïve, self-satisfied tone of his voice to annoy Robin more. 'After all,' he said, 'it's simply a matter of checks, isn't it? The individual conscience is an imperfect machine at the best and needs checking.'

Donald smiled. 'I'm glad at least to hear that the Left recognizes human imperfectibility,' he said. 'I've always imagined that they thought we were living in a state of grace. I must confess, however, that I'm still on Robin's side.'

Robin caught Marie Hélène's eye. How right he was to have offered Donald this new job! It just showed Mother's extraordinary powers of judgement. Who but she would have thought of that solution to Kay's worries?

'You see, John,' Donald went on, 'in a land where centuries of Protestantism have broken down any satisfactory guidance for human frailty, I would prefer to trust myself to the decency and judgement of the educated individual than to be at the whim of the mass hysteria which you call a democratic check. I'm afraid, Robin, though,' and he turned to his elder brother-in-law with a prim smile, 'that some of us have a more satisfactory guide than our poor, troubled personal conscience, haven't we, Marie Hélène?'

His sister-in-law did not return his smile. She was always embarrassed at Donald's attempts at alliance. Anglo-Catholics were certainly not real Catholics, and that was that. So she said rather vaguely, 'I think that anyone who is born a Catholic is bound to find all this rather difficult to understand.'

Robin saw that his mother was about to spring at the rearing of Rome's ugly head, so he turned the conversation. 'One of the worst will-o'-the-wisps you dogmatic Utopians pursue,' he said to John, 'is the idea of human consistency. No human being can hope to be consistent.'

Kay was up in arms at once; her round, unmade-up face shone with high-minded, intellectual disapproval. 'Oh! I don't agree at all there, Robin,' she cried. 'At least not for bringing up children. No woman could, I'm sure. The one thing that matters with children
is
to be consistent. It's the only kind of truth you can give them. That's where Mummy was so wonderful,' she added, and patted Ingeborg's hand.

Gerald felt a little shiver of distaste, but the emotion was now so worn out it hardly touched his brooding introspection. Kay's thankless affection for Inge was the only pill in the overstocked family medicine-chest that he still found bitter, but with the years you can accustom yourself to swallow anything. Two gulps now and he'd forgotten it. All the same, he reflected, the consistency which was one of Inge's chief prides was a somewhat doubtful legend. He wasn't prepared to give it more credence than - than, say, the Melpham burial. He rejected the simile with annoyance. It was becoming a King Charles's head. More profitable, he decided, to pursue the problem of Inge's consistency, since it seemed that the past was relentless tonight with his exhausted mind. ...

'The one thing that matters, Gerald, with the children,' said Inge, 'is to be consistent. We want their little bodies to grow straight and fine like the birch trees on the mountains. But that is not so difficult. They are good strong little animals without blemishes.' Gerald wondered if she really succeeded in forgetting Kay's hand. 'But it is more difficult with their little minds, their thoughts, their feelings. For these to grow straight and strong, there must be trust. And how can there be such if we tell lies?'

'That's all very well in theory,' Gerald answered, 'but it won't be so easy in practice.'

'Is the theory good?'  Inge confronted him with it. The shingle, which fashion had forced upon her corn-coloured glory, removed the majesty from her; with her giant height and ample bosom it made her oddly like a guardsman
en travestie.

'Yes,' said Gerald, 'as you've put it, in the void, of course it is,' and he laughed.

'Never mind about voids,' Inge declared. 'The theory is good. Very well. We must also make the practice good.'

'Which means, I suppose, that three small children should be told that their father has a mistress and that because their mother tells them so they must love their father's mistress and pray for her at night.'

'Now, Gerald,' said Inge, 'you know very well that the children do not pray at night. "If you do something
good,
then you are making a prayer," I tell them.'

'Well, then they will be busy doing good deeds to Dollie because we want it that way.' After eleven years of marriage, he met her theories and wishes with a touch of mockery: it absolved him, he felt, from full responsibility when, as was always the case, he acceded to them.

'Oh, Gerald,' Inge laughed at his strange incomprehension, 'how little you know your own children. They are not little slaves. If they make good deeds, it's because they are good children. Even poor little Kay. She is so much better, Gerald, now. She does not try to fight against love and life so much. You know I even believe her little hand is better.'

'I doubt if medical opinion would support you there, my dear Inge.'

'Medical opinion. Pouf!' Inge literally blew it away. 'And so that is settled. No more of this nonsense that Dollie should not go to Kew with you just because I am taking the children there. You will tell her please to bring some stale buns. Johnnie is not happy unless he can feed the geese. I told him that they are not nice birds, that they have bad tempers and beaks that snap. "No, Thingy, you are wrong," he told me; 'they are the good birds that saved the Capitol." He is clever, Gerald, you know, and his little heart is so big. I think he will be a man to help humanity like Father. But he has a little will of his own, too, like me, Gerald. The other day when you were at Fitzroy Square, he asked, "Where is Daddy?" "He has gone to stay with Auntie Dollie," I told him. "I want to stay with Auntie Dollie." You will tell Dollie this, please, Gerald.'

From the broad street of Queen's Gate the sounds of 'Lady be Good' came floating through the summer heat into the spacious drawing-room. Execrable it sounded on saxophone and banjo. 'I'm just a babe that's lost in the wood, lady be good to me.' Gerald's face twitched with repulsion and he went across to close the french window.

'Oh, no,' cried Inge. 'Those are the poor unemployed men. That is bad, Gerald, to try to shut them out, because they are forgotten. You cannot so easily avoid unpleasant things. You must pay for living in the past with the Vikings,' she said with a smile suitable for a naughty child. 'Give them a shilling, my dear.' She followed her husband on to the balcony. 'Oh, they are my friends,' she cried excitedly. 'That is the little Welshman I told you about, Gerald, who has the boy like Johnnie. Wait!' she called into the street, 'wait! I come to talk to you.'

Gerald saw the one man wink at the other. Such things happened too often with Inge as she got older for him to feel much about it. He tried to remind himself of what she was.

When they returned into the drawing-room, Gerald laid his hand on his wife's arm. 'Give me a moment, please, Inge,' he said. 'I was shutting the windows because
you
were trying to avoid unpleasant things. It's no good, my dear, you don't see what you're involving yourself with. I repeat what are the children going to say when they're asked to love their father's mistress?'

'Gerald, really! What sort of minds do you think these little ones have? Robin is ten. Do you think he is interested in mistresses?'  Inge flung out her arm as though in appeal to a greater audience than her husband - perhaps, to humanity.

'You know very well I don't mean now,' said Gerald. 'But in six or seven years' time, what then?'

'Then they will have good, wholesome minds. They will not think that the acts of the body are bad. What sort of children do you think I am bringing up? Listen, Gerald, shall I tell you what I shall say to them? I shall say, "When
din lille mor
married your papa, they made
you.
Now that was a beautiful thing was it not, children, to make little seeds into three fine, strong bodies? Well that was because your papa and I loved each other so much, that we did not want to be two bodies, but just one body. But this kind of physical love does not last," I shall say. "Some people, especially women, I think, do not need this love of the body after they are no longer young. But men do. You must always remember that, little Kay," I shall say. "And so it was with your papa. And
I
, what do
I
think, children?" I shall say. "
I
think it is natural, as natural as it is that one day you will find somebody whose body you will wish to look at and to touch. For
you
will grow and marry and leave me. Great big Robin and little Kay, and yes, even, perhaps, little Johnnie. Your papa's love for Aunt Dollie is as natural as that will be. And if it is natural it must be beautiful." '

'Or ugly.' Gerald turned on her savagely. 'Why don't you say what you mean?'

Inge's large blue eyes grew round with fright. 'But I don't think it ugly, Gerald,' she cried.

In face of her panic Gerald always capitulated. If anyone was responsible for her view of sex it was surely her husband. He turned away. 'You'd better not keep your unemployed friends waiting,' he said.

'Oh, the poor men, I must get them beer. They will like beer,' and Inge hurried from the room. She called upstairs to the nursery, 'We shall see Papa and Auntie Dollie at Kew; won't that be nice?'  and then, putting her head round the drawing-room door, 'And no nonsense, please, Gerald, about coming back here tonight. I shall tell the children you have gone to stay with Aunt Dollie. Little Johnnie will be quite envious.'

Gerald took up the telephone and dialled the Fitzroy Square number. 'Look, darling,' he said, 'Inge insists that we keep to our plan of going to Kew. No, really, she means it. Oh and will you bring some stale buns? - no, no, she said buns, for John to give to the geese. No, I shall be coming back to the flat. I don't know. As long as you like. There's no reason to keep me
here.'

The unemployed were giving Inge a tune for herself. 'Make my bed and light the light, I'll be coming home tonight. Bye-bye, blackbird.'

So much, thought Gerald, for 1928. And so it had gone on for four years. Freudians would probably have imputed some exceedingly unpleasant suppressed motives to Inge's behaviour. For himself, he found it easier to believe that her actions were those of a spoilt girl who had turned into a woman who was slightly cracked. It was better, of course, to remind oneself that if she had been a smaller woman, if her English had been less comic, all this whimsy and theatricality would not have appeared so ludicrous. She would simply have been thought an impulsive, lively little foreigner, at the worst, a good-hearted eccentric. But for a giraffe or an elephant to behave in that way would just do in a Walt Disney cartoon; in daily life it meant a complete separation from reality. She was, in fact, unbalanced. Mentally and emotionally unbalanced he had decided in those years to consider his wife, which was probably the same as what the Freudians would have said. In either case, what could one do about it? In fact, he had done nothing except to get used to it, forget it and live entirely in his life with Dollie. But Dollie's outburst in Provence had taught him that
she,
at any rate, could not get used to it. On their return, he had done everything he could to keep Inge and the children out of his life with Dollie. It had not been easy, but, at least, with Mrs Salad's aid, he had prevented Inge's little visits of friendship to the Fitzroy Square flat.

Inge seemed far more jealous of Mrs Salad than she did of Dollie. 'She is so dirty and sly, Gerald,' she would say. 'But nobody else I suppose would understand poor Dollie's crazy housekeeping.'

Mrs Salad, in return, resented Inge's existence in the sentimental idyll she had built around her sinning love-birds. 'I know you won't mind my saying so, dear,' she had said one day after a visit from Inge, 'but that's not just 'cos she's foreign that Mrs Middleton has that very coarse 'air.'

'But my wife's hair's admired by everyone, Mrs Salad. It's such a wonderful colour.'

'Bright in colour, perhaps,' she said, 'but very coarse to the touch, I should think. What sort of people would 'ers have been now?'

'Her father was a Labour member of the Danish Parliament, Mrs Salad.'

'Ah!', she said, 'I thought it wasn't just foreign. That's very common 'air, if you'll excuse my saying so.' Mrs Salad was a great snob.

Dollie, too, with her increasing tippling, showed her possessiveness of him more openly. She was only just polite to Inge. In the end, however, it was neither Mrs Salad nor Dollie nor he who made the complete break, it was Inge herself. For the children's sake. And at the Café Royal. ...

The children were now happily settled on the long red velvet sofa. 'And so Robin is a big man now and he chooses smoked salmon,' said Ingeborg. 'Do you think you will like that? It is only red fish, you know, with lemon.' But when Robin solemnly reasserted his choice, she said to the waiter with mock seriousness, 'The gentleman wants a good portion of smoked salmon.'

'What about you, Kay?'  asked Gerald.

Kay, in her disfiguring chamber-pot velour school hat, wriggled nervously. 'I don't know, Daddy,' she said.

'Little Kay will have
hors d'œuvre,'
said Inge; 'it is the same as our favourite
smaahrod,
you know. But not so good, perhaps,' she laughed. 'You will have your dear
smaahrod,
won't you, Johnnie?'

John looked primly down the menu. 'I don't see the sense of having it if it's not so good,' he said. 'I will have plover's eggs.'