The Book and the Brotherhood (26 page)

This late Sunday afternoon in October as he was shaving (he needed to shave twice a day) and studying his cheeks, reddened with drink and covered with little breaking veins, he was thinking about Tamar Hernshaw who had invited herself for a drink that evening. Duncan did not want to see Tamar, but had been unable deftly enough to handle her telephone call which took him by surprise at the office, and had found
himself asserting that he would be delighted. Contrary to what was believed by Gerard and the others, Jean and Duncan had never looked on Tamar as some sort of daughter. Such a relationship would have been, for both of them, too painful, mocking them with a semblance of the real child that had never come. They were both very fond of Tamar however, they cared about her and pitied her. Jean had been touched by Tamar’s ‘crush’ and even moved by it toward a physical warmth which was almost maternal. In earlier days Tamar used to come to tea with Jean and stay until Duncan came home. Duncan was embarrassed by children and had solved the problem by treating Tamar, even when she was quite a small child, as an adult and conversing with her solemnly as with an equal intellect. For this procedure, which had worked remarkably well, Tamar was silently and deeply grateful.

‘This is Jean, as she was when I first met her.’

‘But she’s just the same now,’ said Tamar, ‘she’s so beautiful!’

It had not been Tamar’s idea to look at all those old photos. Duncan, already a bit drunk when she arrived, had brought out the photograph albums and was having an orgy of reminiscence, sitting beside her on the sofa. She was afraid he would burst into tears at any moment. They sat in front of the electric fire which Duncan had put in front of the fireplace where Jean used to burn wood. The room was dark except for one lamp. This saved Duncan the trouble of tidying it up.

‘There’s Sinclair looking roguish, he was pleased with himself that boy. There’s Gerard looking dignified.’

Tamar looked solemnly at Sinclair who had died young, only a little older than she was.

‘The dark burly chap who looks like a rugger blue is me.’

‘Were you a rugger blue?’

‘No.’

‘Who’s the girl?’

‘That’s Rose, she’s changed, she’s got a timid girlie look in
that picture. There’s Robin Topglass playing the fool. The weird creature watching him who looks like a dwarf is Jenkin. That’s Marcus Field who became a monk. The Jewish fellow with the flowing hair is Professor Levquist. I’d forgotten how young he still was in those days.’

‘Who’s the man who looks like a comedian?’

‘That’s Jean’s father. He never liked me. Of course you’ve met him, haven’t you. He doesn’t look like that now. There’s cricket at Boyars.’

‘Rose is batting!’

‘Yes, she was quite good. They played cricket at their school. Jean treated it as a joke. You can just see Jean in the distance at long-stop. Gerard was jolly good at cricket, damn near got his blue. Sinclair could have too only he never took anything seriously. He was a very stylish player. That’s Boyars again, a lot of us with three maids and two gardeners, standing on the steps.’

‘That’s the past! Rose does it all now with that old woman who lives there.’

‘That pretty girl in the front is that old woman. The dog is Sinclair’s dog. He was called Regent. I haven’t thought about that dog since…’

This was one of the points at which Tamar was afraid Duncan would start to cry. She wished the reminiscing would stop. At every turn of the page she was afraid that the face of Crimond would appear. She need not have worried. Duncan had long ago removed every trace of Crimond from the album: Crimond with a squash racket, Crimond with a tennis racket, Crimond with a rifle, Crimond with his arm round Jenkin, Crimond in a punt, Crimond in white flannels, in evening dress, in doublet and hose (in a Shakespeare play), holding one end of a banner saying
Hands off the Soviet Union
(Robin was holding the other end), Crimond smiling, laughing, joking, arguing, orating, looking zany, whimsical, noble, thoughtful, solemn. The fellow was everywhere, as this indubitable evidence showed, had been mixed and mingled into all their doings, all their thoughts, and projects, all the gaiety and all the idealism of their youth.

‘How pretty all the girls look,’ said Tamar, ‘and so well dressed.’

‘That was at a garden party. Yes, the girls were pretty in those days. That’s Marcus Field’s sister. That’s a girl called Tessa something, she was a friend of Jean’s, she died in a fire.
Jeunes filles en fieurs.
As you are now,’ he added politely.

Tamar could not connect herself with those tall elegant young women. She felt sorry for Tessa something who had died in a fire. She felt, these people really existed at Oxford. I only half existed. Tamar had engraved upon her mind, as a text to be meditated upon, Violet’s claim (repeated to everybody) that if she had had enough money for an abortion Tamar would never have happened. This half-nothingness which Tamar might have stored to feed resentment, she treasured rather as proof of some kind of separated dedicated oddity; she was fatherless, motherless, unnaturally conceived, a waif from a land unknown. This was what Gerard saw (and Tamar knew what he saw) as a stainless virgin quality, something good, as if like Cordelia her truth was nothing. Tamar was not sure whether it was good, but she ardently wished never to disappoint that opinion.

‘Did you enjoy yourself at Oxford?’ said Duncan as, to Tamar’s relief, he closed the albums. He evidently felt that he ought to pay more personal attention to his guest.

‘Oh yes, I loved the work. I didn’t seem to get to know many people though, I didn’t have a lot of friends like you and –’

‘Well – everyone experiences a different Oxford. Did you have any lovers?’

Tamar blushed scarlet and moved slightly away from Duncan, pulling down her skirt over her slender legs. She had been aware when she arrived of the smell of whisky on his breath, and she felt repelled by his bulk at close quarters. She was surprised by his question which she felt he would not, in any ordinary state of mind, have asked. She answered it readily enough however. ‘Yes, I had two – well, rather brief – relationships. I liked both the boys, they were very nice, but I think we weren’t in love – we were just anxious to have had the experience.’

‘To get it over! What a way to see it! Then why do it more than once?’

‘I don’t know, it just happened – I wanted to see, to be sure – and they were very kind, it was really good – but they didn’t stay around and I didn’t really want them to.’

‘It sounds rather a quiet scene! What was it you wanted to be sure of?’

Tamar was suddenly uncertain, at least uncertain how to put it. She had known, and clearly known, that she did not want to remain a virgin, literal virginity would have been an irrelevant burden to her, an unnecessary source of anxiety and tension. Better, indeed, to get it over in circumstances where, as she rightly foresaw, no one would get hurt. The two, not thrilling but not unpleasurable, experiences with the nice boys had revealed to her, which was what she wanted to know, ‘what it was like’, leaving her free, until something really serious turned up if it ever did, to forget about it! So far she had not found anything really serious, though she had got as far as imagining that Conrad Lomas might be. Condensing and editing these reflections she said to Duncan, ‘I wanted to have the thing with someone I liked and respected without being committed. I didn’t want intensity.’

‘You’re a cool one, little Tamar.’

It was the day after Tamar’s visit to Jean. Of course Tamar had no intention of talking to Duncan about Jean, that was out of the question, and he had not lingered over her photos in the albums. Gerard had said there was no need to say anything in particular but simply to be there. Tamar did not think that her being there had been any use to Jean, and did not expect it to do anything for Duncan either. She was merely concerned here to obey Gerard, and looked forward to making her meagre report to him, which she felt she could not do until she had seen both of them. Jean had told her to come again, but Tamar wondered if another visit would be either wise or welcome. There had been no doubt about Crimond’s displeasure, even disgust. Tamar had cried in the train going back to Acton. She had felt too, like a scorching electrical ray passing through her body, the emotional tension between Jean and
Crimond. She had cried in the train with shock and fear, but also with excitement. About
that
experience she would not tell Gerard.

‘I think I’d better go home,’ said Tamar, ‘my mother will be –’

‘Oh don’t go yet,’ said Duncan, who, though usually alone in the evening, could not now bear the loss of a drinking companion, ‘have another drink. Why, you haven’t finished that one.’

‘I feel quite tipsy already. Oh dear!’

Tamar had put her glass on the floor and now, reaching for it, had moved her foot and tilted it over. The sweet sherry which she had preferred, had extended a long tongue of dark liquid across the pale rug. ‘Oh,’ cried Tamar, ‘look what I’ve done, how dreadful. I’m so sorry, I’ll get a cloth from the kitchen –’

‘Oh don’t bother, for heaven’s sake, I’ll –’ Duncan heaved himself up to follow her. He did not want her to see the kitchen.

Tamar got there first, and turned on the light. The sight was indeed horrendous. Unwashed dishes, mildewed saucepans were piled in crazy mounds not only in the sink but on the floor. Empty whisky bottles and wine bottles, some upright, some not, had been there long enough to collect layers of greasy dust. The floor was slippery with egg shells, rotting vegetables, mouldy bread. The rubbish bin overflowed with empty tins and slimy packaging. Tamar thought at once, I’ll clear all this up before I go! Something to do with her relationship with her mother made it impossible for Tamar to clean or tidy the flat at Acton. But here she felt an instant power to do magic, to make all beautiful, all in order, to do at least this thing for Duncan for whom she was feeling such intense pity. But first she would deal with the awful sherry stain. The cupboard where she knew that cloths, and mops were kept was beyond a shelf upon which a variety of oddments were huddled together. To reach the handle of the cupboard door she quickly moved a dirty glass jug, then a packet of instant soup, then an old half empty tin of beans, then a tea-cosy… It was already too late, as she seized the
tea-cosy, to do anything about the fact that there was a teapot inside it. The teapot was already in the air. Tamar screamed and grasped at it. But it smashed at her feet, distributing fragments of coloured china and brown tea and spatterings of wet tea leaves about among the empty bottles. Tamar burst into wild tears.

Duncan heard the crash, he reached the door to find his mother’s pretty teapot in smithereens and Tamar wailing. The teapot was an old friend.

The violence, the
achievement
of breaking the teapot, seemed for a moment like a blow aimed at himself. The shattered thing was terrible, like the murdered corpse of a loved animal. Then the next instant, it became something horrible which he had done, his own disgusting black misery externalised as if his tortured body had sicked it up. He looked down at it and saw hell. He even heard himself say ‘Hell’. He experienced, as in a mystical vision, the infinite wretchedness of the whole of creation, its cruelty and its pain, the pointlessness of life, the pointlessness of his life, his shame, his defeat, his condemnation, his death by torture.

Tamar seeing his dismay and hearing the word which he had uttered redoubled her wails. She too felt a shock wave of desolation and terror, but this for her was tempered and redeemed by a clearer and more precise feeling of sorrow for the poor teapot, and pity and love for Duncan.

‘Stop it, Tamar, it
doesn’t matter
, come out of here.’

Shaking her head and weeping Tamar now managed to open the cupboard and got out a cloth which she soaked under the tap, and ran back to the drawing room where Duncan turned on another light. She knelt to mop up the spilt sherry, dropping her tears onto the rug, trying to blend the edges of the stain into the patterned rug, wringing out the cloth to soak the area in water. Then, passing Duncan at the door, she ran back into the kitchen and began hastily picking up the pieces of the broken teapot, scraping up the tea-leaves with her fingers, and mopping up the tea. After that she began, staring down through a haze of tears, running hot water into the sink and dabbing the dirty plates with a mop.

‘I said
stop!
’ Duncan turned off the tap, took the mop away, took hold of Tamar’s hand and led her back to the drawing room. They sat down again on the sofa. Duncan offered Tamar a large white handkerchief. Her tears abated. The clouded horrors faded. They looked at each other.

Tamar saw, as before, his stout bulk, his flushed plump wrinkled face, but she saw in the same look his big animal head with its flowing mane, his huge nostrils like a horse, his sad melancholy of a beast who has been a prince, and now that he had taken off his heavy glasses the apologetic but intent and humorous gaze of his dark eyes.

She said, ‘I do like your strange inky eye, it’s beautiful, have you always had it?’

‘Yes. The rug looks all right already. But your stockings are all stained with tea.’

Tamar laughed and adjusted her skirt. With the centre light on she could now see the desolation of the room. The pictures had been removed from the walls, the bookcase was empty, the mantelpiece was bare, the armchairs, pushed back against the wall, were covered with newspapers and random clothes. Everything was dusty. Tamar recognised the scenery of un-happiness as it existed too in her own house.

Duncan, seeing her glance around, said, ‘You’d better go now, Tamar, this is no place for a white woman.’

‘But I want to wash up and clean the kitchen.’

‘No. Thank you for coming. Are you coming to Guy Fawkes at Gerard’s? Perhaps I’ll see you there. Please don’t worry about the teapot.’

Once again Tamar cried on the way home, but with different tears.

‘Who was Guy Fawkes anyway?’ said Lily Boyne.

It was the evening of the Guy Fawkes day party at Gerard’s
house, and everyone, with the exception of Gideon, seemed to be feeling nervous or out of temper.