The Ka of Gifford Hillary (22 page)

Unquestionably I should have followed my father’s advice, and broken with her before it was too late. But the fact was that I hadn’t. I had in all solemnity, on oath in church, taken her for better or worse till death us should part. After that what right had I to repudiate her? She, although forced by me to live in uncongenial surroundings, had kept her part of the bargain, and without undue complaint. Had I allowed my material welfare and personal preference for life in the country to weigh more with me than her happiness? It seemed that I had; for by some sacrifice of income I could have got a job in London, and still retained my seat on the Board of the firm. Should we then have been drawn closer together and achieved contentment? When in my twenties and thirties I had been far from averse to theatres, parties and night-clubs; and, as making friends came very easily to me, although I should have seen much less of some of my old ones I should probably have made new ones among Edith’s acquaintances; so a move to London might have turned our marriage into a success. Yet I had been too selfish for the idea of tearing up my own roots even to cross my mind.

Against that it could be argued that the marital doctrines of the Christian Church are entirely contrary to human nature.
Man is by habit a polygamous animal. Every other religion and every people of whom we have any historical knowledge have freely recognised that, and no contortions of reasoning have ever produced a convincing argument that he was meant to be anything else. Nearly all non-Christian women, and a vast number of Christian ones as well, are still the playthings of many men or get only a share in one. So why should we accept the arbitrary ruling that a woman like Edith is entitled to the sole rights over one man for the whole of his adult life.

Again, it cannot be denied that while women are restricted in their sexual lives by the urge to make a home and secure a permanent protector for their children, they are by nature also polyandrous. Edith was only a little over thirty when we agreed that she should divorce me, and still good-looking. She could easily have found a second husband had she cared to look out for one. That she had not done so was no fault of mine.

Yet the fact remained that she hadn’t; so both by the law of the land, and by the moral precepts in which we had both been reared, I still remained responsible for her. The question was had I fulfilled my obligations?

Legally I had; for after deducting tax, the allowance I made her and the cost of the children’s education had taken a good third of my net income during the years before my father died. But morally I hadn’t; for while I had since enjoyed a life of comparative luxury myself I had left her to battle on her own against the increased cost of living, and a constant prey to anxiety about how to make both ends meet. True, I had not realised the straits to which she had been put until an hour or so ago; but I ought to have done so, and should have had I not been too occupied with my own affairs to give the matter a thought. I knew that she had about three hundred a year of her own, and when I had agreed to allow her five hundred, I had felt that eight hundred should be ample for her to keep herself and the children in reasonable comfort. But that had been thirteen years ago. My income had more than trebled since, but hers had not, although its purchasing power had shrunk to far less than its original value.

That she had never asked me to increase her allowance now seemed like heaping coals of fire upon my head; and in one
matter I felt particularly guilty. When the children had left school, no longer having to pay their fees, but giving them a hundred a year apiece instead, had made me several hundred a year better off. Instead of cheerfully pocketing that surplus I ought to have turned it over to Edith.

This matter of school fees having brought my thoughts to the children, I began to consider my treatment of them. When I rushed into the war, and left home for an R.A.F. training camp, they were aged only four and two respectively. On my return from India I wrote to Edith saying that I would like to see them. She replied that she had no objection, but they were still too young to travel alone, and our divorce having been so recent it would cause her too much pain to meet me with them; moreover, even if she could find someone to send in her place she was not prepared to let them go to either Southampton or London as long as the war and danger from air raids continued.

The obvious answer was that I should have gone down to Torquay.

Of course I meant to, but I was up to my eyes picking up all the threads again at Hillary-Comptons. So I put it off until I should be a little less busy. Soon afterwards we were asked to double our output of craft in preparation for the Normandy landings; then my father fell ill and I had to take on much of his work as well as my own. What with one thing and another I never got down to Torquay.

In consequence I did not see the children again until 1946, after Edith had leased this house and moved with them up to London. By that time Christobel was ten and Harold eight—about as difficult an age as could be for a father to meet again two children who had forgotten even what he looked like. Edith had decided that the meeting would be less awkward if she did not appear; so they were duly delivered to me at the Berkeley, where I gave them lunch, and afterwards I took them to the circus.

They were pop-eyed with curiosity at seeing me and maintained a disconcerting stare throughout the meal. I did my best to initiate conversation but I fear there must have been a horribly false ring about my hearty jollity. Their replies were mostly whispered monosyllables and during the afternoon the only spontaneous remark by either came from
Harold, who asked me just before the time came for them to be collected:

‘Why don’t you come home and live with Mummy?’

I replied that when he was older he would understand; and after their departure almost collapsed with relief that the ordeal was over.

Nevertheless, during the next three years I screwed myself up from time to time to repeat the operation, with theatres or cinemas in lieu of the circus, as a blessed escape from having to make stilted conversation with them for the greater part of our meetings.

I would have liked to have them down to Longshot, in the hope that being with them for several days at a stretch, and in different surroundings, would enable me to break through their reserve; but I didn’t, because I was afraid of upsetting our staff. That sounds a poor reason, I suppose; but from the war onwards it has been extremely difficult to find servants who are prepared to live in such isolated spots. Up till 1949 my father—with whom I had gone back to live after my return from India—and I had had to make do with his old valet, who was then in his seventies, and an elderly, cantankerous cook named Mrs. Beagle. As our two women helps from the village worked only till midday most of the extra work entailed by two children coming to stay would have fallen on her; and, as it was, whenever she was asked to do anything at all out of the ordinary she always complained that she was being ‘put upon’. I disliked her so much that if she had given notice I would not personally have minded, but for the last few years of his life my father was a semi-invalid, and for his sake I did not feel that I dared take the risk of our being left cookless.

The year of 1949/50 was a more than usually busy one for me. My father’s death entailed a great deal of extra work winding up his estate; then I met and became engaged to Ankaret, which led to my leaving Longshot for a time while it was thoroughly done up. As I was divorced we were married at a registry office, then after lunch with a few intimate friends we went straight off on our honeymoon. To have asked the children to such a wedding would, I felt, have been a great mistake, but I had, of course, told Ankaret all about them, and after she had had ample time to settle in at
Longshot I asked her if she would mind if we had them to stay.

She agreed at once and I am sure had every intention of trying to make friends with them; but they proved impossible. Christobel, then fifteen, looked older than her years and was a precocious piece. On the second night of their stay Ankaret and I had a long-standing date for drinks before dinner with one of our neighbours, but when we arrived we learned that our host had suddenly been taken ill so the party was off. In consequence we were back at Longshot an hour before the children expected us, and a pretty scene we found there.

My well-grown young daughter was in our bedroom with a good part of Ankaret’s trousseau scattered about her. At the moment of our entry she was parading herself before the mirror in an evening dress by Balmain that Ankaret particularly cherished, and when sharply reprimanded by me she had the effrontery to say that as she and her school-friends often swapped clothes she had been hoping that Ankaret would lend her some of hers during her stay, and was trying on a few to see which would suit her.

Ankaret kept her temper very well, but she was not unnaturally annoyed, particularly as when bringing up the children Edith had, apparently, slipped back into the Wilks’s tradition that a bath once or twice a week was quite enough for anyone; so all the clothes that Christobel had tried on had to be sent to the cleaners.

Between ourselves we excused this piece of licence as a manifestation of adolescence; but worse was to follow. A few days after the children left Ankaret discovered that a bottle of her most expensive scent and four pairs of nylons were missing. I did not take the matter up with Edith because I knew how greatly it would upset her, but there was little margin for doubt about where these aids to glamour had gone.

Harold made himself an equally unwelcome guest in an even more unpleasant way. Although only thirteen he was already a budding intellectual—of the type that I find particularly repulsive. The Wilks, like most people of their class, were True Blue Conservatives so, presumably from sheer contrariness, Harold was in the process of becoming a Red Hot Communist. His conversation was still stilted, but he lost no opportunity of showing his disapproval of all that Longshot
stood for; and now and again, with the callowness of extreme youth, burst into long diatribes, lifted almost verbatim from the books he was reading, on what a much better place the world would be when all sources of production and distribution were controlled by the workers. Bored as we were with his ill-digested cant, we put up with it and even paid him the compliment of trying to reason seriously with him until the night before he left. During dinner he launched an attack on British aristocracy, stigmatising them en bloc as worthless parasites, and it was perfectly clear that he was gunning for Ankaret. I shut him up by saying that the sooner he looked up the lists of the sons of peers who had given their lives fighting in the last two wars, and started to read the history of his country instead of a lot of subversive lies by the enemies of it, the sooner he would deserve the food that he was eating.

By tacit agreement we never asked the children to Longshot again, and I certainly cannot blame Ankaret for not having suggested that we should do so. I dropped back into my previous routine of sacrificing one of my evenings every three or four months when I happened to be in London to taking them out, and so matters had continued until I had, so unexpectedly, met my death.

Of the two of them I preferred the girl. She was hard as nails, her mind was mediocre, and her pert manners grated on me; but she at least showed a zest for living. Harold’s one redeeming feature seemed to be his attachment to his mother; and no doubt it was his long-nurtured grievance that it was she who should have been the mistress of Longshot Hall, and in due course have become Lady Hillary, which had led to his antagonism to the upper classes—as represented in his mind by my father and myself—and to his hatred of Ankaret. But by any standard he was a poor fish, and I marvelled that even with a woman of Edith’s limitations I could have begotten such a son.

But the question I now had to face was would they have been two quite different people had I carried out my full responsibilities as a parent to them?

Undoubtedly they would have if I had continued to make a home for them with Edith as, when I first asked her for a divorce, she had begged me to do. It was incontestable that
their outlook and manners would have been coloured to some extent by my own, and those of the country gentry who would have continued to form our social circle. The talk they would have heard and the books I should have given them to read while their minds were forming could not have failed to prove a life-long influence. They might not have turned out to be good or kindly people, but at least they would have possessed the asset of some culture; Christobel would have developed a better sense of moral values, and Harold not become an embryo traitor to his country.

Even had I not gone back to Edith I could still have exerted a considerable influence on the formation of their characters, had I kept in closer touch with them. War or no war, on my return from India I ought to have gone down to Torquay every few weeks for a couple of nights. When they came to live in London, instead of giving them only a few hours of my time I ought to have had them to stay with me every holiday for a few nights in an hotel. Again, had I bothered to exert myself I could have had them with me at Longshot by arranging to put them up at the village inn, bought them fishing rods and ponies and taught them to enjoy the countryside. They would then have accepted Ankaret much more readily. She would, I am sure, have smoothed away Christobel’s gaucheries and later presented her at Court. And, of course, instead of jumping at the chance to get Harold into a firm of accountants shortly after his eighteenth birthday, I should have sent him to follow in the steps of several generations of Hillarys at Cambridge.

Instead I had left them to grow up as best they could, with no one to guide them other than their well-meaning but weak and sadly limited mother. Still worse, although I could well have afforded to be more generous, I had deprived them of many of the joys of youth by condemning them to make do on a pittance.

When I had fixed a hundred a year each as their allowance, I had been thinking in terms of my own youth, but I now recalled what one of my friend’s sons had told me not long ago. He had assured me that if one took a girl out for the evening in London these days there was little change out of a tenner, and that if it was to be a real celebration with champagne for dinner and at a night-club afterwards, it could
easily run one into twenty pounds. That the thought of Harold had not crossed my mind in this connection was hardly surprising, but all the same it was an indication how the cost of even more modest pleasures must have gone up.