The Forsyte Saga, Volume 2 (42 page)

Freed from poetry and modern music, from Sibley Swan, Walter Nazing and Hugo Solstis, Fleur was finding time for her son – the eleventh baronet. He represented for her the reality of things. Michael might have posthumous theories, and Labour predatory hopes, but for her the year 1944 would see the eleventh baronet come of age. That Kit should inherit an England worth living in was of more intrinsic importance than anything they proposed in the Commons and were unable to perform. All those houses they were going to build, for instance – very proper, but a little unnecessary if Kit still had Lippinghall Manor and South Square, Westminster, to dwell in. Not that Fleur voiced such cynical convictions, or admitted them even to herself. She did orthodox lip-service to the great god Progress.

The Peace of the World, Hygiene, Trade, and the End of Unemployment, preoccupied all, irrespective of Party, and Fleur was in the fashion; but instinct, rather than Michael and Sir James Foggart, told her that the time-honoured motto: ‘Eat your cake and have it', which underlay the platforms of all Parties, was not ‘too frightfully' sound. So long as Kit had cake, it was no good bothering too deeply about the rest; though, of course, one must seem to. Fluttering about her ‘salon' – this to that person, and that to the other, and to all so pretty, she charmed by her grace, her common sense, her pliancy. Not infrequently she attended at the House, and sat, not listening too much to the speeches, yet picking up, as it were, by a sort of
seventh sense (if women in Society all had six, surely Fleur had seven) what was necessary to the conduct of that ‘salon' – the rise and fall of the Governmental barometer, the catchwords and clichés of policy; and, more valuable, impressions of personality, of the residuary man within the Member. She watched Michael's career, with the fostering eye of a godmother who has given her godchild a blue morocco prayer-book, in the hope that some day he may remember its existence. Although a sedulous attendant at the House all through the spring and summer, Michael had not yet opened his mouth, and so far she had approved of his silence, while nurturing his desire to know his own mind by listening to his wanderings in Foggartism. If it were indeed the only permanent cure for Unemployment, as he said, she too was a Foggartist; common sense assuring her that the only real danger to Kit's future lay in that national malady. Eliminate Unemployment, and nobody would have time to make a fuss. But her criticisms were often pertinent:

‘My dear boy, does a country ever sacrifice the present for the sake of the future?' or: ‘Do you really think country life is better than town life?' or: ‘Can you imagine sending Kit out of England at fourteen to some God-forsaken end of the world?' or: ‘Do you suppose the towns will have it?' And they roused Michael to such persistence and fluency that she felt he would really catch on in time – like old Sir Giles Snoreham, whom they would soon be making a peer, because he had always worn low-crowned hats and advocated a return to hansom cabs. Hats, buttonholes, an eye-glass – she turned over in her mind all such little realities as help a political career.

‘Plain glass doesn't harm the sight; and it really has a focusing value, Michael.'

‘My child, it's never done my Dad a bit of good; I doubt if it's sold three copies of any of his books. No! If I get on, it'll be by talking.'

But still she encouraged him to keep his mouth shut.

‘It's no good starting wrong, Michael. These Labour people aren't going to last out the year.'

‘Why not?'

‘Their heads are swelling, and their tempers going. They're only on sufferance; people on sufferance have got to be pleasant or they won't be suffered. When they go out, the Tories will get in again and probably last. You'll have several years to be eccentric in, and by the time they're out again, you'll have your licence. Just go on working the human touch in your constituency; I'm sure it's a mistake to forget you've got constituents.'

Michael spent most week-ends that summer working the human touch in mid-Bucks; and Fleur spent most week-ends with the eleventh baronet at her father's house near Maple-durham.

Since wiping the dust of the city off his feet, after that affair of Elderson and the P.P.R.S., Soames had become almost too countrified for a Forsyte. He had bought the meadows on the far side of the river and several Jersey cows. Not that he was going in for farming or nonsense of that sort, but it gave him an interest to punt himself over and see them milked. He had put up a good deal of glass, too, and was laying down melons. The English melon was superior to any other, and every year's connexion with a French wife made him more and more inclined to eat what he grew himself. After Michael was returned for Parliament, Fleur had sent him Sir James Foggart's book, ‘The Parlous State of England'. When it came, he said to Annette:

‘I don't know what she thinks I want with this great thing!'

‘To read it, Soames, I suppose.'

Soames sniffed, turning the pages.

‘I can't tell what it's all about.'

‘I will sell it at my bazaar, Soames. It will do for some good man who can read English.'

From that moment Soames began almost unconsciously to read the book. He found it a peculiar affair, which gave most people some good hard knocks. He began to enjoy them, especially the chapter deprecating the workman's dislike of parting with his children at a reasonable age. Having never been outside Europe, he had a somewhat sketchy idea of places like South Africa, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand; but this old fellow
Foggart, it appeared, had been there, and knew what he was talking about. What he said about their development seemed quite sensible. Children who went out there put on weight at once, and became owners of property at an age when in England they were still delivering parcels, popping in and out of jobs, hanging about street corners, and qualifying for unemployment and Communism. Get them out of England! There was a startling attraction in the idea for one who was English to a degree. He was in favour, too, of what was said about growing food and making England safe in the air. And then, slowly, he turned against it. The fellow was too much of a Jeremiah altogether. He complained to Fleur that the book dealt with nothing but birds in the bush; it was unpractical. What did ‘Old Mont' say?

‘He won't read it; he says he knows Old Foggart.'

‘H'm!' said Soames, ‘I shouldn't be surprised if there were something in it, then.' That little-headed baronet was old-fashioned! ‘Anyway, it shows that Michael's given up those Labour fellows.'

‘Michael says Foggartism will be Labour's policy when they understand all it means.'

‘How's that?'

‘He thinks it's going to do them much more good than anybody else. He says one or two of their leaders are beginning to smell it out, and that the rest of the leaders are bound to follow in time.'

‘In that case,' said Soames, ‘it'll never go down with their rank and file.' And for two minutes he sat in a sort of trance. Had he said something profound, or had he not?

Fleur's presence at week-ends with the eleventh baronet was extremely agreeable to him. Though at first he had felt a sort of disappointment that his grandchild was not a girl – an eleventh baronet belonged too definitely to the Monts – he began, as the months wore on, to find him ‘an engaging little chap', and, in any case, to have him down at Mapledurham kept him away from Lippinghall. It tried him at times, of course, to see how the women hung about the baby – there was something very
excessive about motherhood. He had noticed it with Annette; he noticed it now with Fleur. French – perhaps! He had not remembered his own mother making such a fuss; indeed, he could not remember anything that happened when he was one. A week-end, when Madame Lamotte, Annette and Fleur were all hanging over his grandson, three generations of maternity concentrated on that pudgy morsel, reduced him to a punt, fishing for what he felt sure nobody would eat.

By the time he had finished Sir James Foggart's book, the disagreeable summer of 1924 was over, and a more disagreeable September had set in. The mellow golden days that glow up out of a haze which stars with dewdrops every cobweb on a gate, simply did not come. It rained, and the river was so unnaturally full, that the newspapers were at first unnaturally empty – there was literally no news of drought; they filled up again slowly with reports of the wettest summer ‘for thirty years'. Calm, greenish with weed and tree shadow, the river flowed unendingly between Soames's damp lawn and his damp meadows. There were no mushrooms. Blackberries tasted of rain. Soames made a point of eating one every year, and, by the flavour, could tell what sort of year it had been. There was a good deal of ‘old-man's-beard'. In spite of all this, however, he was more cheerful than he had been for ages. Labour had been ‘in', if not in real power, for months, and the heavens had only lowered. Forced by Labour-in-office to take some notice of politics, he would utter prophecies at the breakfast-table. They varied somewhat, according to the news; and, since he always forgot those which did not come true, he was constantly able to tell Annette that he had told her so. She took no interest, however, occupied, ‘like a woman, with her bazaars and jam-making, running about in the car, shopping in London, attending garden-parties'; and, in spite of her tendency to put on flesh, still remarkably handsome. Jack Cardigan, his niece Imogen's husband, had made him a sixty-ninth-birthday present of a set of golf-clubs. This was more puzzling to Soames than anything that had ever happened to him. What on earth was he to do with them? Annette, with that French quickness which often annoyed him, suggested that
he should use them. She was uncomfortable! At his age –! And then, one week-end in May the fellow himself had come down with Imogen and, teeing a ball up on half a molehill, had driven it across the river.

‘I'll bet you a box of cigars, Uncle Soames, that you don't do that before we leave on Monday.'

‘I never bet,' said Soames, ‘and I don't smoke.'

‘Time you began both. Look here, we'll spend tomorrow learning to knock the ball!'

‘Absurd!' said Soames.

But in his room that night he had stood in his pyjamas swinging his arms in imitation of Jack Cardigan. The next day he sent the women out in the car with their lunch; he was not going to have them grinning at him. He had seldom spent more annoying hours than those which followed. They culminated in a moment when at last he hit the ball, and it fell into the river three yards from the near bank. He was so stiff next morning in arms and ribs, that Annette had to rub him till he said:

‘Look out! you're taking the skin off!'

He had, however, become infected. After destroying some further portions of his lawn, he joined the nearest golf club, and began to go round by himself during the luncheon-hour, accompanied by a little boy. He kept at it with characteristic tenacity, till by July he had attained a certain proficiency; and he began to say to Annette that it would do her all the good in the world to take it up, and keep her weight down.

‘Merci
, Soames,' she would reply; ‘I have no wish to be the figure of your English Misses, flat as a board before and behind.' She was reactionary, ‘like her nation'; and Soames, who at heart had a certain sympathy with curves, did not seriously press the point. He found that the exercise jogged both his liver and his temper. He began to have colour in his cheeks. The day after his first nine-hole round with Jack Cardigan, who had given him three strokes a hole and beaten him by nine holes, he received a package which, to his dismay, contained a box of cigars. What the fellow was about, he could not imagine! He only discovered when, one evening a few days later, sitting at
the window of his picture gallery, he found that he had one in his mouth. Curiously enough, it did not make him sick. It produced rather something of the feeling he used to enjoy after ‘doing Coué' – now comparatively out of fashion, since an American, so his sister Winifred said, had found a shorter cut. A suspicion, however, that the family had set Jack Cardigan on, prevented him from indulging his new sensation anywhere but in his private gallery; so that cigars gathered the halo of a secret vice. He renewed his store stealthily. Only when he found that Annette, Fleur, and others had known for weeks, did he relax his rule, and say openly that the vice of the present day was cigarettes.

‘My dear boy,' said Winifred, when she next saw him, ‘everybody's saying you're a different man!'

Soames raised his eyebrows. He was not conscious of any change.

‘That chap Cardigan,' he said, ‘is a funny fellow!… I'm going to dine and sleep at Fleur's; they're just back from Italy. The House sits on Monday.'

‘Yes,' said Winifred; ‘very fussy of them – sitting in the Long Vacation.'

‘Ireland!' said Soames deeply. ‘A pretty pair of shoes again!' Always had been; always would be!

MICHAEL TAKES ‘A LUNAR'