In the Time of Greenbloom (52 page)

“And who is
he
?” fired Mother, releasing Boscawen-Jones from her scrutiny. “Another nasty atheist who's going to start flooding England with black pamphlets like Bernard Shaw?”

“Listen to her, listen to her!” shouted Greenbloom. “You should be taking notes Jane. I told you to bring a note-book with you.”

Mother ignored him. “Teddy! What was that book I made you burn last week?” Father sat up and seized his opportunity with fatal clumsiness.

“What book? You've burned so many.” He looked round in his clandestine way at Michael and John. He wanted to please her, but as always when he had the chance of it he automatically forfeited it; preferring to take comfort in the
reality of her vexation rather than in the uncertainty of her affection.

“Always burning my books,” he went on. “Only yesterday little Melanie was telling me that she saw a whole lot of 'em in the loft over at Plas David!”

Mother flashed him an angry mock-angry smile: she was stalking more important game. “Oh never mind. Michael!
you
brought it home, you remember the one I mean?”

“Oh the Blag—” Michael corrected himself, “The Black Girl,” he said with beery care.

“That's right.” She frowned. “But wasn't there something about God in it?”

“She means
The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God
,” said Father. “You didn't make me burn that, you snatched it out of my hand before I'd got beyond the first page.”

“Of course I did! The old fool's going senile.”

“I'm
not
!” said Father.

“Not
you
! Bernard Shaw. Oh Teddy, don't be so tiresome.”

“You burned it?” Greenbloom gazed proudly at Boscawen-Jones in the manner of an owner whose dog's reputation for fierceness has not let him down. “You hear, Jane, she 'as burned a first edition of the best thing Shaw is ever likely to write. This little woman has burned it unread.”

“Extraordinary!” said Boscawen-Jones with great boredom.

“I didn't need to read it. I could see by Teddy's expression that it was evil, couldn't I Teddy?” Without waiting for an answer she glared briefly at Boscawen-Jones as she retasted the flavour of his comment.

“What do you mean, ‘extraordinary'?”

“Nothing!” Boscawen-Jones yawned. “Only perhaps that your action was a little—
outré
Mrs. Blaydon.”

“
Please
!” said Greenbloom peremptorily.

Mother ignored him. “
Outré
—did you say ‘
outré
'?” she asked Boscawen-Jones.

Still careless of his peril, not realising that until now she
had scarcely noticed him, that he had been set aside for quick scrutiny at a later time, Boscawen-Jones aped Greenbloom's tired wave of the hand.

“The wrong word perhaps,” he said, “but one does not like the flavour of philistinism—it is
vieux jeu
. Certainly though I should say that to have burned the book unread was a trifle odd.”

Trembling finely like a terrier at a rat-hunt Mother leaned forward at him over the intervening space of the carpet. John knew that at last she had smelt out his latent hostility and that in a moment she would set her small jaws unerringly into the centre of his weakness and close them tightly together.

Greenbloom's violent nudge was lost on Boscawen-Jones as he recoiled a little by pushing his hunched spine against the back of the armchair. Around him with small movements the others closed in, watching sharply to see where she would strike.

“So you think it ‘a trifle odd'.” Extravagantly and with odious affectation she waved her hand in a burlesque of his gesture. “Well
I
think your opinions are a trifle odd. I suppose they might be borrowed ones; young men are always borrowing from each other; but it's a pity that they never seem to borrow anything of any value—only shoddy little mannerisms and undergraduate glibness. I've had to watch my sons doing it for years; I've learnt a lot from dealing with them.
I breast-fed them all in this chair
, some of them before the Great War—long before
you
were born.”

Boscawen-Jones cleared his throat. Mother's threatening aspect coupled with the awful association of the Nursing Chair seemed to have a paralysing effect on him. His hands ceased shaking and he sucked in his thin cheeks nervously like a fish so that his face looked more fragile than ever.

“And I think I ought to warn you, Mr Boscawen-Jones, that if any more books like that come into my house
that's
where they'll go—into the fire. There's enough blasphemy in the World without people putting it between the covers of books. Oh I know you young men think you can afford to be
clever! That's the Devil!
he
always likes people to think that they're clever; that's how he catches them. He keeps on
telling
them that they're clever; he whispers it to them at night just as they're going to sleep and he's there waiting for them in the morning to whisper it again when they first wake up. And after a time they begin to believe him; they get a superior expression, they use French words where an English one would do and they begin to imagine that they're great actors or painters or—poets. But then I'm quite sure that
you
don't believe in the Devil; you're too young, you know too much, it's only the old who believe in the Devil isn't it Mr Boscawen-Jones?”

Boscawen-Jones uncrossed his legs carefully. The length of her speech had given him time to erect some sort of a defence. To give himself further time he coughed into his handkerchief.

“I've never given the Devil very much thought I'm afraid,” he said with an effort at loftiness.

“Well it's time you did,” she fired back at him. “It's quite time you did, because I'm perfectly sure that he's been thinking about
you
quite a lot.” She paused, “I'm only hoping that you haven't come up here to write
his
sort of poetry, because if you have you will find that you won't be able to write a line, not a single line. Other people have tried their hand at Black Art at Plas David; an evil woman last year; she took drugs and tried to paint the Copper Mines to look like Hell—and they
did
! and she very soon left. So you see you're by no means the first person to be attracted by the beauty of our Island—we're quite used to people coming here and setting themselves against it and we're not frightened of them in the very least—”

Putting a hand to his forehead Boscawen-Jones got up suddenly.

“I'm afraid I do not feel very well. This sort of thing—” his voice fell away as he looked quickly at Greenbloom. “If you don't mind Horab, I think I'll go and lie down for a few minutes.”

Greenbloom, like a person who has enjoyed the first turn
in a good cabaret, waved at him lazily. “By all means,
mon cher
, go to your bed. Rest! Relax for a little while. But do not say that Greenbloom was not right, that I was wrong to bring you here. I told you that it would be an experience to meet Mrs Blaydon. Tomorrow, despite all she says,” and he smiled at Mother genially, “you will write better than you have written for a very long time.”

Behind him Michael got up with alacrity. “It is rather close in here,” he said. “The Gulf Stream you know. If you like I'll take you over to the other house and show you to your room.”

“If you must,” said Greenbloom. “But I shouldn't bother, Mick; Jane is enjoying himself immensely, he has crossed swords with your mother and now, as I warned him, he must suffer. But he is happy.”

He shook Mother's hand as Boscawen-Jones accompanied by Michael made stiffly for the door.

“I congratulate you Mrs Blaydon. You were splendid.”

She snatched her hand away with a swift smile, “Don't be ridiculous!”

“I am not! You
were
splendid. Your
contempt
—quite beautiful! It disarmed poor Jane, he had no weapon, nothing at all save his naked pride. Magnificent! I can only thank God that I did not have the misfortune to be born one of your four sons.”

“If you had, you would have been very different.”

He spread his hands. “But I don't doubt it.”

“And then perhaps,” she went on with a resumption of some of her previous intensity, “you would not always have been trying to steal my sons; they would have been your brothers.”

“
Steal your sons
! Come come Mrs Blaydon!”

“Oh
I
know, Horab. You can't fool me. First of all Michael at Oxford, and look what happened to him—a pass degree—and then John, and
he's
not got his School Certificate yet, and now John and Michael together. That's why you've come, isn't it?”

“But you forget Jane! I have not yet finished devouring Jane; why then should I want to start on your sons?”

“Oh,” she said, “that little man, if he is a man;
Jane
!”

“It's short for Janus,” said Father who had now finished digesting the scene of a few minutes before and was avid for a further display of her anger. “It is not a
Christian
name, it means the two-headed man, the deceiver.”

But she was not with him, “That little creature couldn't deceive a flea,” she said. “No wonder you had to come up
here
with him. I know why.”

“Tell me,” said Greenbloom. “Please Mrs Blaydon!
Dear
Mrs. Blaydon! tell Greenbloom why he has come up here.”

“Because you are looking for our religion,” she said. “That's what you're after. For all your talk of these half-baked philosophers you're always turning up, that's what really attracts you, that's why you can't leave my sons alone; it's their Faith.”

He considered it; his small face still trying to resist the pleasure of the smile he desired but dared not wear, Greenbloom nodded contentedly.

“And that is why I am not your enemy?”

“Not so far,” she said.

“Not so long as I give them—your sons—back to you?”

“Unharmed,” she said. “So long as you give them back to me unharmed, Horab.”

“I see! I will confess that in a way you may be right. I do find your sons interesting, though not so interesting as yourself and for reasons other than those you suppose, and you may be sure that I shall always see that they are returned to you unharmed even if, as with John some time ago, I may not myself accompany them.” He sipped at his sherry and then looked up at her again smiling. “Tell me, do you want nothing in return for my interest? If I were to take Michael back with me to Paris for example during this vacation, you would demand nothing from me?”

“Oh yes I would. That's just where you're wrong. You don't imagine I'd let you have my sons for nothing, do you?”

“Not for a moment I assure you. I suppose you may be banking on my conversion, yes?”

“No,” she said. “That can wait. What I want is some money.”

“Money?”

“Yes.” She leaned forwards with her legs wide apart and her hands on her knees. “A nice fat cheque.”

“How fat?”

“That depends,” she said. “It depends on how your friend Jane behaves and the sort of poetry he writes and how
you
behave and how Michael and John behave while you are here. Say a hundred pounds, that would do very nicely for the Rood Screen.”

“
Kitty dear
!” Father from the midst of his second glass of sherry leaned forward incredulously.

“Oh be quiet,” she said, and turning caught sight of John. “And that's not all,” her voice hardened. “John! Go over to Plas David and tell Mary that Horab will be over in a few minutes and that she can serve the dinner. There's something else, something I'm worried about,” she lowered her voice again. “I'm worried about John.”

He heard the words as he closed the door behind him.

How had she known? Mary had not been over again and Nanny would not have said a word. Father of course had seemed strange about the curate drowning himself, but not definite or sure enough to have mentioned his suspicions to Mother. So how had she known?

He walked down the drive slowly. The curious thing was that none of it made any difference to his intention; although he had watched and listened to them all in there, no single thing that had been said had touched the hard centre of his intention at all. In some way it had even strengthened it; the fact that he had been able to see what moved them all, that nothing of what should have proved surprising in their behaviour had surprised him in the very least, had only confirmed him in his sense of isolation. None of them knew anything; neither Michael who was vaguely sozzled by the
Benllwch beer, nor Father who suffered Mother, nor Mother who suffered her love of them all, nor Greenbloom nor Boscawen-Jones who were as remote as the Eiffel Tower. They knew nothing; they were all searching and seeking, chopping and changing, and he was tired of whatever it was they represented—if it were anything at all. They at least originally must have had a sense of purpose, had grown into their uncertainty by slow and relatively painless stages; but
he
—he permitted himself to think of Victoria for a moment as he turned into the Plas David drive. At the far end of it Mary was awaiting him coldly.

At Porth Newydd Lady Geraldine Bodorgan greeted them in the hall. In her green county hat she came up to them with great composure, smiling adorably beneath the dead-eyed stags hanging on the walls. She had the sweetest voice and at fifty-two was still a flirt in the way a child is a flirt. She flirted with life and everything in it; furniture, flowers, animals and people; even with her clothes. Her grey eyes, aristocratically exophthalmic, or seeming to be so by their size and pallor were like those of Edward the Seventh or George the Fifth and they welcomed everything and everyone as they conveyed the secret and graceful rapture of her life's perpetual encounters. Such eyes would smile even behind closed lids, in sleep, or in death; and in all the years the Blaydons had known Lady Geraldine they had never seen them show grief anger or dismay despite the fact that she should have been most unhappily married to her angry little husband the Admiral.