The Book and the Brotherhood (28 page)

It was still early but had been dark for some time and in London gardens all about the fireworks had begun to go off. The warm glow of bonfires could be seen here and there, the occasional long leaping flame, and sudden golden lights revealed the brick façades of houses, and the branches, some leafless, some evergreen, of distant trees. There were abrupt whirring and whizzing and popping sounds, small sharp explosions, and the special sizzling noise of ascending rockets and their sighing or crackling burst high in the air and brief glory of scattering or slowly falling stars. Jenkin loved rockets. Gerard always, as a matter of form, invited his next-door neighbours to the Guy Fawkes party, but they never came. The neighbours on one side found firework merriment embarrassing, and those on the other, who had children, set up their own celebration rather earlier than Gerard’s. This party was now nearing its close, the rockets had been seen off with ritual cries of ‘aaah!’ and there was a murmur of talk from the other side of the wall. Jenkin became aware that he was being watched. A row of faces, children’s faces, had appeared at the top of the wall. Jenkin looked at the small heads and said, ‘Hello.’ The children looked at him in silence. Then suddenly, all together, they disappeared, and there was a little muffled burst of laughter from the other side. Jenkin had never really got used to children. That was perhaps one of the secrets (and it was a secret) of his success as a schoolmaster. He understood the awful private miseries of children, their horrors. In school, he enjoyed that easy, enviable, almost absolute authority
which seems like a gift of nature, persuasive, magical, very rarely coercive. But he was not romantic or sentimental or maty, he was aware of children as another race, chauvinistic, hostile, often unintelligible. His pupils were a set of individuals to whom his relation was scrupulously professional. A perceptive person (his friend Marchment) once said to him, ‘Jenkin, you don’t really like children!’ He did like children, but not in the general and conventional sense. That row of heads, made by some trick of the light to look red, as if of some island tribe or painted natives, unnerved him, making him aware of the instability and vulnerability of his present state of mind. He felt he had suffered a defeat. Perhaps this was his last Guy Fawkes party?

‘Why, Violet, you’re looking really smart tonight!’ said Gideon. ‘Isn’t she?’

Violet actually blushed and wriggled like a coy maiden, as Patricia said later. She had certainly made an effort. She had put away the blue spectacles; it emerged later that she had treated herself to contact lenses. She had also, with the help of a hairdresser, made her hair look more attractively tousled, the fringe less dominant, less straight and less severe. She was wearing a fairly simple well-cut light-blue cocktail dress with some glittering decoration round the neck.

‘You look almost sophisticated,’ said Patricia, ‘but those spangles at the top won’t do, I expect you could get them off. I do wish you’d come over and help us like you used to, and Gideon needs a secretary, don’t you, darling? Everyone needs to be needed –’

‘We didn’t expect you,’ said Gideon, smiling benevolently.

‘I expected her,’ said Gerard, ‘come and get a drink, I’ll mix you a special.’

Violet followed Gerard into the dining room and Gerard quickly closed the door. He said, ‘Violet, we do so want you to think again about the money.’

‘Who’s “we”?’ said Violet, deepening the frown lines above her nose and the tragedy lines below her mouth.

‘Pat and me and Rose.’

‘How does Rose come in?’

‘She just agrees with us.’

‘It’s none of Rose’s business.’

‘All right, but look, Violet, be rational, be
kind
to us. Father said in his will that he trusted us to look after you. You must let us execute his wishes – it’s like being forced not to keep a promise.’

‘He said no such thing in his will, he didn’t mention me in his will.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Pat told me. Not only no money, but no mention.’

Damn, thought Gerard. What do I say now? ‘Violet, my father wished us to help you, he assumed we would.’

‘If he had wanted me to be “helped” after his death he could have arranged it! Anyway I don’t want “help”!’ Violet’s face, now that of a demonic cat, also expressed a kind of spiteful glee. ‘Pat wants me to be her housemaid, you heard her just now, she wrote me a patronising letter, and you tell me lies about Uncle Matthew’s will. I may be poor and a relation but I’m not going to play the part of poor relation to gratify you and Pat!’

‘Well, we are determined to help Tamar. She must go back to Oxford.’

‘Oh, I know it’s all a plot to help her, not me! Nobody really cares about me! Tamar’s perfectly all right, she’s got a good job. Later on she might not get a job, it gets worse each year, she realises she’s
lucky.
’

‘We shall help Tamar.’

‘You know perfectly well she won’t accept it, you’re just humouring your conscience! It would be psychologically disastrous for her. Can’t you leave her alone? You think she’s some sort of sturdy virtuous peasant girl. She isn’t, she’s a precarious unstable neurotic. She couldn’t stand the pace at Oxford, she’d have had a breakdown. Why do you think your precious Oxford is such a wonderful place for a girl to be? You know Tamar never enjoyed it, she just made herself ill with work! Tamar needs a quiet orderly
life and a steady job. She’s not an intellectual, thank heavens!’

Gulliver put his head round the door, took a look at Gerard and Violet, said ‘Sorry!’ and disappeared.

‘Why can’t you be happy?’ said Gerard. ‘You seem not to want to be.’

‘That’s my business. Oh, you understand
nothing
!’

Gerard poured out a glass of the fruit cup and gave it to Violet. ‘I’m sorry. You mustn’t be cross with Pat, she means well. We’ll talk again later.’

‘You said you’d mix me a special!’

Gerard took a bottle of gin from the sideboard and poured a generous quantity into Violet’s glass.

‘Do you expect me to drink
that
?’ She kept the glass however and went off smiling.

Rose had rescued her sandwiches from the fridge and brought them into the drawing room, where Gulliver had declared he was hungry. The sandwiches were now cold and damp, Gulliver and Lily were eating them however. Rose then fetched her canapés from the dining room, just vacated by Gerard and Violet. The form had always been that people ate and drank all the evening and wandered about as they would. Now Patricia wanted to make a drama of herding everyone to collect their plateful. This also raised the question of when exactly the fireworks were to begin.

‘What’s the matter with Tamar?’ said Patricia, coming in and looking disapprovingly at the rapid unauthorised consumption of food which was going on. ‘She can’t keep still, she won’t sit down, she keeps sliding about the place like a cat. I suppose she wants a tête-à-tête with Gerard.’

‘She’s just shy,’ said Rose, ‘she’s so self-effacing.’

‘I don’t think she’s effacing herself, she keeps jumping around like a performing flea! I expect it’s mummy’s presence.’

‘Violet looks lovely. She can still do it when she tries.’

‘She usually prefers the hag act. Tonight it’s “I care for nobody, no not I.” She can turn herself into anything, she’s better adapted to life really, she doesn’t suffer like we do. I’ve
never seen so many fireworks, the side passage is full of them. They’re just like schoolboys, aren’t they, our men.’

Rose did not care for ‘our men’.

Jenkin came in from the garden, entering through the glass doors and pushing his way between the curtains. ‘Has Duncan come?’

‘No, but Violet has.’

‘Duncan won’t come,’ said Rose.

But just at that moment the door bell rang.

Patricia’s knife and fork and plate policy worked out much as Rose had anticipated. The regulars, trained by Gerard, resented the innovation and ignored the pie and curry and trifle arrangement, eating up the sandwiches and canapés, and thereafter, scorning the plates and utensils, making their own impromptu sandwiches by tearing open rolls and jamming in lettuce leaves and bits of ham and tomato which then fell out onto the carpet. Gerard’s little cakes, discovered in the larder, were popular too, so was the cheese which Rose had provided. One or two guests out of politeness (Jenkin) or because they were genuinely interested in the steak and kidney pie (Gulliver) or because the whole thing had been their own idea (Patricia) fussily found a place to sit and some piece of furniture to sit at and uncomfortably, while the others strolled about, sat down to a pretence of ordinary dinner. Gideon, to Patricia’s annoyance and chagrin, defected to the strollers. Claret was now provided, and the fruit cup was still available. The gin and whisky were not in demand at the early stages, even by Duncan who was the last to arrive and startled his friends by asking for Perrier, then drinking the cup, then only at a later stage the whisky. By then Gulliver and Lily were also on whisky. Lily, who had earlier discovered the gin-laced glass abandoned by Violet and drunk it up, was by now distinctly tipsy. Tamar caused distress by eating nothing; at last she accepted a plate of the trifle which was discovered next morning, untouched, upon a window ledge behind a curtain. She also, for a while, disappeared, and was found by Rose
upstairs in Gerard’s bedroom in the dark, sitting at the window and, she said, watching the children next door who had been capering round the garden in their night clothes. By the time coffee was served it was getting very late and the evening was in danger of being wrecked by what Gerard subsequently called ‘that simulacrum of a dinner party’. It appeared that no one was in charge. Gerard had pointedly given up the responsibilities of a host, Rose who would normally have kept an eye on the time had withdrawn into the position of a spectator. Jenkin was in some kind of a dream, almost seeming gloomy, perhaps getting steadily drunk on the powerful claret. Gideon, impishly enjoying himself as usual, was everywhere about with a smile on his face, waiting to see what would happen. Violet too was smiling, drinking very little, picking up pieces of kidney in her fingers out of the pie, and spooning trifle into her mouth and replacing the spoon in the bowl. Patricia was already in the kitchen washing up.

‘What about the fireworks?’ said Jenkin, suddenly awaking from his reverie.

‘It’s too late for fireworks,’ said Gerard, ‘we would disturb the children next door.’

‘According to Tamar, they’re all out in the garden in their nighties,’ said Rose.

‘Well, we could send up a rocket or two, there isn’t time for the whole lot, everybody wants to go home!’

Gulliver, realising that he might soon be dangerously drunk, had already proposed that he should leave, forgetting that the letting off of fireworks was the purpose of the evening.

‘Where’s Tamar?’ said Jenkin.

‘In the kitchen helping Pat wash up!’ said Rose.

‘Where’s Duncan?’ said Gerard.

‘Drinking whisky in your study.’

‘I rather hoped Tamar would take charge of him tonight,’ said Gerard, ‘but she’s so withdrawn.’

‘She probably wants another heart-to-heart with you!’ said Rose.

‘At any rate Duncan started on Perrier. Do you think that was Tamar’s influence?’

‘Look, we
must
have our fireworks,’ said Jenkin, ‘I’ll start, you just herd them out. Don’t forget the torches and sparklers.’

Jenkin, anxious not to have his programme curtailed by Gerard, had already set off the Golden Rains and several Roman Candles and a Peacock Fountain before the whole company, wearing their overcoats, had ambled or stumbled out into the garden. Everyone was given a torch, a bunch of sparklers and a box of matches. The sparklers, little metal sticks to be held in the hand while the ignited end spitted brilliant sparks, were to provide audience participation and, during intervals between the ‘pieces’, extra light. However some of the guests dropped their sparklers on the grass (Gull and Lily) or absently put them in their pocket (Duncan) or were too haughty (Pat and Violet) or too shy (Tamar) to ignite them. Rose and Gerard dutifully, and Gideon with a great deal of facetious to-do, set light to theirs at intervals and waved them about, revealing the rather dazed faces of their fellow guests in the very bright very white light of the sizzling sparks. Fireworks were, to keep them all in countenance, still to be seen glowing and ascending here and there from distant gardens where children were late to bed or adults still at play. Looking up in a moment of darkness Rose saw, in the upper windows of the house next door, the faces of children looking out. She lit another sparkler, held it up to reveal herself, and waved to the children. Dazzled by the glare, she could not see whether they waved back. Gerard had never made friends with these children, and they were strangers to Rose.

Jenkin had now reached the penultimate stage, which was the catherine wheels. The rockets came last. He had nailed three large wheels onto three posts set back near (but not too near) the walnut tree, the highest post in the centre. As he went round with his torch checking the three contraptions the others, who had provided murmurs, even cries, of admiration for the earlier events, fell silent, and it was for a moment dark in the garden. One or two torches, momently switched on,
illumined feet, some sensibly, some foolishly clad, and patches of wet trampled frosty grass. The air was becoming very cold, noses felt frozen, and those without gloves buried their hands deep in their pockets. Gulliver, badly wanting another drink, was supporting himself by a hand on Lily’s shoulder.

Suddenly, almost simultaneously, the big catherine wheels became alive, turning for a moment or two quite slowly, then accelerating into huge dazzling circles of fire which uttered a terrifying burning noise as of an inferno. Everybody gasped suitably, and indeed the sight and the sound were not only impressive but frightening. No one fidgeted, all stood still, staring open-mouthed and tense at the three great fiery circles.

Lily, who had been silent for some time in a self-concentrated state of quiet drunkenness, suddenly said, close to Gulliver’s ear, ‘Why are they called catherine wheels?’