The Book and the Brotherhood (33 page)

Duncan, distracted for a short while by company, now returned to his wound. He had eaten too much breakfast and felt sick. His whole being felt sick, sick, sick. He had announced on the previous evening that he must go very early on Sunday to prepare for a meeting. He had intended earlier not to come at all, but had decided he ought to appear so as not to seem to be avoiding Tamar. Now that seemed a ridiculous reason. Why should anybody think he was avoiding Tamar, what motive could they imagine he might have for doing so? This calculation was a measure of the guilt he felt about what had, so briefly, so quickly, happened that evening. He could scarcely now picture what state of mind, what sudden desperate need for consolation, had led him to take that little girl, that
child
, into his arms. It didn’t, now, seem like lust, it was simply an irresistible craving for love, for a woman’s love, for being held close in a woman’s arms and hearing her say, as
she
had said, ‘I love you, I’ll always love you.’ It was as if Tamar had murmured, ‘I’ll protect you, I’ll shield you, I’ll take your
hurt away, I’ll carry you out of the world, I’ll make you invisible and perfectly safe for ever and ever.’ Perhaps she had said something like that. I was very drunk that evening, Duncan said to himself. I must have been dreadfully drunk to act in that way. Was I disgusting, brutish, awful? She didn’t seem to think so
then
, I could have been anything and be loved. But what did she feel later? Duncan did not like to believe that she now saw him as a drunken brute. But then neither did he want to believe that she
really
loved him. What would that mean, what could it bring about? What words could he use, what words could he ever use, to tell Tamar that he was grateful, but it was indeed something momentary and he could not return her love? Was that what he felt now about Tamar, little innocent Tamar with her schoolgirl hair and slender legs? He thought, she’ll assume, she’ll
know
that it was an aberration. I was in a state of shock, I’d just had the solicitor’s letter, I hope she took
that
in. Oh God, why did I act so stupidly, why do I have to have
this
as well! I can’t go on living with myself much longer. Of course it was her doing, she started it, I’d never have made a move, I’d never have wanted to! What a minx, what a temptress, what terrible ill luck, what an accursed doomed creature I am.

Duncan had not exactly recovered from the solicitor’s letter, but had adjusted his mind so that the letter was not a death sentence, not a total extinction of hope. This was partly the result of a talk with Gerard which had taken place the day after Tamar’s visit. Duncan showed Gerard the letter and they discussed it. It was a relief to talk, for once (for Duncan had not lately been eager to see his friends) to Gerard, though Gerard’s lively pleasure in the talk annoyed him. Gerard loved listing pros and cons. He still thought of himself as the leader, the healer, the one who was never in trouble, the one who had remained young; while Duncan had become heavy, cumbersome, wrinkled and old. Even his hair, though it was thick and dark and crinkly, was like a heavy wig upon his head, while Gerard’s hair curled and shone like a boy’s. These were ludicrous thoughts of course, as ludicrous as a new feeling of jealousy about Jenkin, as if Jenkin, always around the place,
made it increasingly difficult for Duncan to talk freely to Gerard as he had once done. The fact that they had
once
been so close however remained as an eternal guarantee. Gerard had suggested, or rather elicited from Duncan, the idea that the solicitor’s letter did not mean anything final. It could even be some sort of try-on or something which Crimond had ordered Jean to do as a matter of routine. Duncan must not be seen to take it seriously. Thus inspired Duncan had replied to the solicitor that he was surprised to receive the letter, he did not want a divorce, he loved his wife and desired and expected her to return to him before long. Since then nothing more had been heard. Gerard said that was a good sign.

But what was the use of signs and hopes when all being was corrupt and bad, when one had been metamorphosed into something so defeated and contemptible and base? How can an absolutely humiliated person be reinstated, accorded the
respect
which love implies, even be
forgiven
for having let himself fall so low? It was no use appealing to justice here. How
could
Jean want to come back? If Crimond ditched her she would run to Joel, indeed she might do anything. Jean was brave, she was unlike Duncan, she would run against the guns baring her breast, she would never come crawling back, she would find some new amazing thing to do. She was still young. Crimond too, he was young. Duncan dreamed at night, and later more and more in long obsessive fantasies by day, about that farther past in which the
myth
of his defeat, his
fall
, had been, once and for ever, established, about the blow, the stairs, and Jean’s voice calling from below, so affectionate, so false, as he stood holding in his hand that little tangle of Crimond’s hair: Crimond, tall, thin, white, naked, pale-eyed, brilliant-eyed, walking about as he pleased in Duncan’s sleeping and waking fantasy. He was as obsessed with Crimond as he was with Jean, and as awfully bound to him.

He had not communicated with Tamar, or heard from her, in the now lengthy interim. He had considered sending a very vague letter, but letters are dangerous. Better to say nothing. They would both say nothing, do nothing, that was how it would be, so that the act itself would be gradually un-done,
dissolved by time. Thank God he could rely on Tamar’s silence. The idea of Gerard finding
that
out… Duncan would never speak to anyone about it. He had never spoken to anyone about his eye. Only about Tamar, he would forget.

He had paraded, as his ‘reading’, a Government White Paper and another Stationery Office publication, about tax, but he had no intention of looking at these. Really to read, he had secretly brought two thrillers, which of course he would not take downstairs. He consumed more and more thrillers in these days. He sat down on his bed and opened one, got up and put on his overcoat, then sat down again. Longing for his wife pervaded him,
shook
him, in the form of misery and rage. He would soon resign from the Service, become a recluse, disappear, perhaps kill himself. He would do something terrible. He would kill Crimond. He would have to.

Rose Curtland was standing at her window watching the snow falling slowly, thickly, steadily, in plump flakes, in straight lines, since the wind had dropped, like a curtain, like a grille, outside her window, fascinating, dazing, beginning to conceal the landscape. Rose had put on a woollen shawl round her shoulders. The house was cold and uneasy with a new and special unease. Perhaps it was the end of an era. Perhaps they would never again be, all of them, together in that house as they had so often been in the past. Everyone seemed to be uneasy, touchy, nervous; everyone that is except Gerard who always was, or always appeared to be, calm, in charge of himself and others. Duncan was, of course, poor Duncan, unhappy and anti-social, a bit aggressive. Tamar seemed to be ill, had eaten practically nothing at dinner and at breakfast, had admitted that she had a headache. Jenkin, always a problem because of his tendency to disappear, had been excessively invisible, running off at once after dinner when everyone was supposed to sit round the drawing room fire and drink whisky. Annushka, arthritic and not allowed by Rose to carry wood, was cross because Rose had chided her for asking Gulliver to carry wood instead of telling Rose who would have
carried it herself. Even Mousebrook the Mauve Cat, deserting his usual winter place, elongated upon the tiles at the back of the big cast iron stove, was irritable and out of sorts and had jumped suddenly away and run off when Rose tried to pick him up. Mousebrook was described as mauve because his tabby grey looked mauvish, and had looked so to Rose on the night, eight years ago, when Annushka had brought him as a stray kitten in out of the rain. The name Mousebrook, appearing out of the air, was clearly his own.

Rose occupied the big corner bedroom beside the turret in the ‘Gothic’ part of the house. She loved this side with its glittering high-pointed windows, facing toward the garden, and the turret with its little French-style leaded dome, and deplored the philistinism of her great-grandfather who had, after
his
father had sold ‘the big house’, so insensitively altered and enlarged the pretty place, whose complete elegant beauty survived only in photographs. Sinclair had talked about restoring it. From her two main windows Rose enjoyed the same view as Duncan’s, over the garden toward the Roman Road. The turret room, which opened directly out of her bedroom, and which she used both as bathroom and dressing room, looked three ways, toward the back, toward the side and toward the front. At the side beyond the stable block and the orchard, visible between curving fields, was a segment of the village of Foxpath, while nearer to the river, and about half a mile from the village, was the church, its light grey tower rising above the snowy trees. A small congregation still trudged out there on Sundays, Rose always turned up too when she was in the country, and some of her guests usually came out of politeness or curiosity. The view toward the front, best from the big front bedrooms of the Edwardian façade, showed the front lawn, the fancy iron gates, a brick wall along the lane, fields, water meadows, and the twisting of the river marked by big pollarded willows. The view on the farther side of the house which was encrusted with useful Edwardian ‘horrors’, was toward the woods, also showing, as a straight line drawn over the curve of a distant hill, the continuation of the Roman Road. There was one good bedroom on that side
which Rose had given to Gulliver. The two best bedrooms in front were occupied, as always, by Gerard and Jenkin, Lily was in the room on the village side usually occupied by Duncan and Jean. Rose felt that Duncan would be especially unhappy there alone, and besides, Lily, as a new guest and a woman, must be given a fine room. A small bedroom between Rose’s and Duncan’s remained unoccupied. Tamar was in the upper turret room, above Rose’s dressing room, which she had always occupied since childhood on her visits to Boyars. Annushka had a self-contained flat on the ground floor beyond the kitchen.

The Reading Parties, two or three in a year, which had originally lasted a week, and now usually lasted three days, were designed originally to fit into university vacations while avoiding summertime travels, and Christmas when other obligations might divide the group. Rose always spent Christmas in Yorkshire at the house of her cousins, Reeve and Laura Curtland, the parents of Neville and Gillian. She felt bound to observe this custom, it was the only time when she regularly saw what remained of her family, though she made occasional visits at other times. Rose did not get on too well with Laura Curtland, a rather peevish
malade imaginaire
; and since Reeve had become more of a recluse and Laura more of a (as Rose saw her) self-pitying invalid, they rarely came to London. Rose, who had always assumed that her cousins regarded her as ‘odd’, now felt that they saw her, and pitied her, as an eccentric ageing spinster; but when it came to it she quite enjoyed these Christmases and was fond of her relations who certainly knew how to leave her alone. Neville and Gillian, grown up now and at the university, Gillian at Leeds and Neville at St Andrews, were talking about a London flat; so, they would be more frequent in her life, expecting to be invited to Boyars, even perhaps to be allowed to borrow the house, and generally patronising her with the naive insolence of the young. Rose was alarmed at how much this prospect depressed her; she was not used to thinking of herself as cut off from young people, and she liked the vivacious pair in question. Gerard had always spent Christmas with his father and
his sister and Gideon, and till lately Leonard, at the house in Bristol, and it had never been suggested that Rose should join that family party. Jean and Duncan, fleeing English festivities, had usually disappeared to France. Violet and Tamar, refusing all invitations, had a Christmas by themselves, always described by them as ‘quiet’, and assumed by others to be abysmally dull. Plans for this year were still vague, but with Matthew gone and as Pat and Gideon showed no signs of being elsewhere, Gerard assumed that the trio, with Leonard if he condescended to turn up, would celebrate the feast at Notting Hill. He would, no doubt, for Christmas Day at least, invite Duncan and of course Jenkin. Jenkin’s Christmases were mysterious. Rose believed that he went to ‘help out’ at some charitable ‘settlement’ in the East End, and then got drunk with his schoolmaster friends. He never told anyone, not even Gerard, exactly what he did. Rose wished that she too could be in London, but could not, without prior notice and without a signal from Gerard, ‘disappoint’, if that was the word, her worthy cousins.

Rose turned back from the window and the dazed slow falling of the snow to her pretty bedroom, so coolly and clearly revealed in the snow-light, which had scarcely changed since her parents had slept in it, and Rose had slept in the upper turret room. Rose came less often now to Boyars; the house was slipping from her. Annushka felt it, the cat felt it. She had begun recently, for the first time, to feel afraid at night, frightened not by the silence of the countryside, but by the silence of the house itself. She had begun to think about
later on.
If only she had someone really of her own to leave Boyars to. If she left it to Gerard he would leave it, or give it, back to her family, if she left it to Jenkin – well, what would Jenkin do, sell it to help the poor probably. It was no use leaving it to poor Duncan, or to Jean who was as rich as Croesus and had no children – or to Tamar who would certainly make a disastrous marriage. Well, why not to Tamar? How cross Neville and Gillian would be! Tamar would have guilt feelings and hand it over, it would burden her, she would have no luck. How dreadfully childless they all were. Now supposing Tamar were
to have a son… What foolish, even pathetic thoughts, caged thoughts, mean thoughts, so remote from those happy, free, as it seemed
virtuous
days, when Sinclair was at Oxford and Gerard and Jenkin and Duncan and Robin and Marcus, whom she now so dimly remembered, had come to this house and really
worked
and
argued.
That was before Jean’s marriage, and Rose had been the only girl. It had all depended on Sinclair, if he had only lived… But these were bad dreams, a constant rat-run of her mind, where she always pictured Sinclair as so happy, so lucky. He too could have made a disastrous marriage, given up his studies, squandered what was left of the family fortune and taken to drink. He might have caused her endless grief instead of endless joy; but what could that matter, so long as he was there? Strange, she thought, they all died in accidents, my Irish grandfather was killed out hunting, my Yorkshire grandfather fell from a mountain, my father died in a car crash soon after Sinclair’s death, if I had married Gerard and had a son he would probably have scarred my heart with fear and anguish before he too got burnt or drowned.