The Ka of Gifford Hillary (21 page)

The children’s attitude to my death and Edith’s gabbled prayers had weighed me down with an appalling sense of guilt. It was vain for me to argue with myself that I was not responsible for the characters of my son and daughter; for had I brought them up they might have become very different people. On the other hand, that did not apply to Edith, and by going back to the beginning I tried to assess how far I was really responsible for her broken and, since we had separated, dreary, financially-harassed existence.

We had met in the early thirties and, such are the trivialities upon which our fates hang, it is most unlikely that we should ever have met at all had I not when at Cambridge taken up tennis in preference to any other sport. Her brother Tom was also a keen tennis man. Apart from that we had little in common and I did not even have any particular liking for him. But we had both made up our minds to see Wimbledon week that year and he invited me to stay for it at his home in South London. As, for me, the alternative would have been an hotel, I accepted.

The Wilks—that was their name—lived in one of those large Victorian houses, each having its own short carriage drive and two acres or more of garden behind it, that used to abound in the wealthier suburbs of London. Most of them have since been pulled down, to make way for blocks of flats, or turned into small schools, nursing homes and boarding houses, but in the thirties quite a number of them were still serving their original purpose. That of the Wilks was on Tulse Hill, and unexpectedly pleasant I found it.

The family consisted of father, mother, three sons and three daughters. Mr. Wilks was the London agent for a Lancashire cotton firm, but we did not see much of him; perhaps because he was already beginning to feel the effects of the cancer that carried him, and a good part of his income, off not long afterwards. The mother was one of those fat, good-natured women who believed in piling people’s plates high with food and did not seem to mind in the least if her children turned the house upside down in the process of enjoying themselves. The sons and daughters were much of an age, ranging from eighteen to twenty-six, Edith being the
middle of the three girls, and three years older than myself. They had a host of friends who were always rushing in and out, or staying at a moment’s notice to lunch or dinner, both of which were movable feasts depending on the convenience of the majority. In fact the place was a cheerful Bedlam.

That, of course, was why I liked it. At Longshot I had been brought up as an only child, and although I had been allowed to have a friend to stay now and then in the holidays, life in my father’s house never varied in its decorous routine. I, my school-friends, and the children of our few scattered neighbours could get as dirty as we liked in garden, fields and ponds, but we always had to appear clean, tidy and punctually at meals. No shouting indoors or practical jokes were permitted, much less riotous games of hide-and-seek during which young men and women squeezed themselves under the beds or into the wardrobes of their elders.

The fact that the Wilks did not normally change for dinner, had numerous customs that seemed strange to me, and spoke with a slightly Cockney accent did not in the least detract from my enjoyment, and during the hectic fortnight I spent with them it was not at all surprising that I should have more or less fallen for Edith.

I say ‘more or less’ because it was no question of a grand passion—anyhow on my part. It was simply a case of propinquity. Attracted by her blue eyes, golden hair, abundant health and ready laughter, I attached myself to her from the first evening. How large a part the fact that I was the heir to a Baronetcy and a considerable fortune played with her, I shall never know; but she was certainly not a clever and designing woman by nature, so I think it only fair to assume that she was equally attracted to me physically. Anyhow, she accepted me as her special cavalier with unconcealed pleasure, and we were soon seeking opportunities to be alone together. It was that which led to my undoing.

On the afternoon of my last Sunday at the Wilks’s she took me up to an old play-room at the top of the house. We both knew that to see her collection of stuffed animals was only an excuse, as we had already indulged in several bouts of kissing and cuddling in secluded corners of the garden. The door was hardly closed behind us before we were two very
over-heated young people clasped tightly in each other’s arms.

I did not actually seduce her, but during the hour that followed things did not stop far short of that. Anyway, when I left on the Monday morning, although not a word had been said about marriage, I felt that I had definitely committed myself.

That, of course, was before World War II had practically eliminated class distinctions as far as the sexes were concerned. In those days the traditions of behaviour current before World War I still governed most decently-brought-up young men. It was accepted that any young woman with whom one could scrape acquaintance in a park, a dance hall or any public place was fair game, and that if she allowed herself to be seduced a ‘gentleman’ was under no obligation to marry her. But any unmarried girl to whom one had been formally introduced was definitely taboo. In Victorian times many a man was caught by the sister of a friend allowing him to do no more than kiss her in a conservatory, and while by my young days things had to go a lot further than that before there was any talk of putting up the banns, it was still recognised that playing such games as I had with Edith in the old play-room could be taken by the girl as a clear indication that the young man wanted to marry her.

Now, thank goodness, girls and boys of all classes have been educated to speak out to one another frankly about these matters and, both parties being willing, can indulge in such pastimes without necessarily being committed for life to a partner with whom they have nothing in common but a sexual attraction that may burn itself out in a few months.

I have since learned that even in my day many of my contemporaries did not abide by the current rules; so perhaps, owing to lack of experience, I behaved as a simpleton and could have wriggled out of it had I wished at the price of some twinges of conscience; but the fact is it never occurred to me to do so. I should add I have not the least reason to suppose that Edith deliberately trapped me, and such a thought never even crossed my mind. I accepted the situation as quite natural and assumed similar ones determined the futures of most young men of my kind.

This may all sound as if I was not the least in love with
Edith, but that was far from being the case. I am now simply reviewing the affair in retrospect; but, at the time, my overheated imagination was rarely free from visions of my lovely blonde divinity and my arms felt a positive physical ache to hold her once more in one of those embraces to which she responded so passionately. In consequence, when the Wilks invited me down later that summer to stay at a house they had taken at Paignton, I accepted with alacrity. Down there in Devonshire we found more opportunities for hectic love-making, and from my visit I returned engaged.

Naturally the next step was for Edith to come and stay at Longshot Hall. It was then that the first shadow fell on our romance. She simply did not fit and, even blinded by passion as I was, I could not help being aware of it. My father received her most kindly and as long as she was with us showed not the least trace of his disappointment at my choice. But the night after she had gone, he tackled me about it.

Without beating about the bush he told me that he considered Edith entirely unsuitable as a wife for me, and begged me to break off our engagement. Then he said the sort of thing that so many parents before and since must have said to their children in similar circumstances—that even in the best of marriages the honeymoon relationship cannot be retained indefinitely, and that for lasting happiness, putting all question of class apart, common interests and a similarity of outlook are absolutely essential. He added that, regrettable as it might be to have to break one’s word, it was far better to do so than to condemn oneself to years of bickering that ended in the squalor of the divorce court.

He put it to me, too, that although it requires much more courage to jilt a girl than tamely to allow oneself to drift into a marriage the outcome of which is foredoomed, it was, in such circumstances, up to a man to face the music, not only for his own future happiness but because he was also responsible for that of the weaker partner—the girl who had temporarily aroused his passion and, in the nature of things, was probably even more blinded by passion than he was himself.

How right my father was all older people know, and the really awful thing is that after Edith’s stay at Longshot, at such times as I forced myself to think of my engagement dispassionately
I knew that he was right. Yet, partly owning to a continuance of the physical bewitchment she exercised over me, and partly because I could not screw up the moral courage required to inflict such an abominable hurt upon her, I refused to do as he wished, and pushed these doubts about the future into the back of my mind. At the end of the following term I came down from Cambridge, and we were married a few weeks after Christmas.

It had always been intended that I should go into the family business and this necessitated living near Southampton. Edith had never been allowed to know of my father’s opposition to the match and once he had withdrawn it—stipulating only that after the marriage I must not expect him to have anything to do with the Wilks—he behaved very generously towards us. He bought me a pleasant little property not far from Longshot and gave me a thousand pounds towards furnishing the house. The excitement of getting ready our home, the wedding, and the honeymoon occupied my mind to the exclusion of all pessimistic thoughts during those winter months, and Edith and I were as happy together as any pair of newly-weds could be when we took possession of Monksfield Grange in the early spring.

But that state of things did not last long. Edith had never hunted, nor shot, nor fished and she set her face firmly against taking up any of these pastimes. She did play about for a while in the garden, but the only kind of flowers she really liked were the sort that arrive wrapped in Cellophane from a florist’s shop, and after the first summer she abandoned even the pretence that she enjoyed growing things. The Wilks were not uncharitable people but their idea of benevolence began and ended with sending cheques annually to certain London hospitals and taking a stall at the local Church Bazaar. Helping to run the Women’s Institute, visiting sick cottagers, reading to the elderly bedridden poor, and other such good works to which most women of any position in the country consider it incumbent on them to devote a certain amount of time, were entirely foreign to Edith. By way of defence she declared that she thought it wrong to go poking one’s nose into other people’s private lives; but the fact of the matter was that not having been brought up to talk to labouring people as fellow human beings it embarrassed her horribly,
apart from giving them orders, to have anything to do with them at all.

Our neighbours, of course, all came to call, and welcomed Edith among them as my wife. But they soon took her measure and, while it never reached a point where they omitted to ask us occasionally to dinner or consistently refused our invitations, she proved incapable of making a single woman friend among them, and to the end they never came to regard her as one of themselves. They could not be blamed for that; neither could she. It was simply that she was a fish out of water, and lacked the ability to adapt herself to new surroundings.

The sort of life she really hankered after was a flat in Kensington, plenty of afternoon bridge, frequent meals out at restaurants, theatres, cinemas, and an occasional day at the races. It is greatly to her credit that she rarely grumbled and never attempted to nag me into changing our way of life. And, of course, the coming of the children provided her with a new, enthralling interest. But, despite the consolation she found in them, with every year that passed it became increasingly apparent that she loathed the country, and everything connected with it, more and more.

As I have stated earlier, very soon after the war broke out I joined the R.A.F. I must now admit that this eagerness to get into uniform was not solely inspired by a red-hot patriotism. Had I been forced to give a reason for my action at the time, I would have said it was, and honestly believed that to be so. But later I realised that subconsciously I had in part at least been impelled by the desire to get away from Edith.

My escape to freedom brought to a head the sore of discontent with my marriage that had long been secretly festering at the back of my mind. In 1940 I was only twenty-seven; so the best part of my life still lay before me. I decided without haste but absolutely definitely that I would not waste another day longer than I had to on Edith and I wrote asking her to give me a divorce.

At first she refused, but when she found that I was adamant in my determination not to return to her, and perhaps influenced a little by the lure of being able to live once again, after the war, in her beloved London, she gave in. It took some time to arrange but I gave her grounds, agreed to allow
her five hundred a year free of tax, to give her custody of the children and to pay for their education. Well before I returned from India everything had been settled. She had left the Grange, which lay uncomfortably close to Southampton’s bomb alley, and taken the children down to furnished lodgings in Torquay. I had never seen her again until this evening. Now, as I thought of these things in the lounge below her bedroom, I felt compelled to face the awful question: had I been justified in leaving her?

It was now pitch dark in there, as I knew from the distinct change in the appearance of my surroundings; for I had already learned that although in my new state I could see in the dark, the effect of darkness was in the nature of a dimming, which limited my range of vision and made nearby things seem as though seen only by twilight. Again my glance roved over the collection of gaudy, tasteless knick-knacks that so perfectly expressed Edith’s personality, and here and there I noticed one which by recalling fresh memories of our past together gave me a fresh tweak of conscience.