The kindly ones (16 page)

For some reason my mind was carried back at that moment to Stonehurst and the Billson incident. This was all the same kind of thing. Betty wanted Templer’s love, just as Billson wanted Albert’s; Albert’s marriage had precipitated a breakdown in just the same way as Templer’s extravagances with Anne Umfraville. Here, unfortunately, was no General Conyers to take charge of the situation, to quieten Betty Templer. Certainly her husband showed no immediate sign of wanting to accept that job. However, before an extreme moral discomfort could further immerse all of us, a diversion took pace. The door of the dining-room, so recently slammed, opened again. A man stood on the threshold. He was in uniform. He appeared to be standing at attention, a sinister, threatening figure, calling the world to arms. It was Widmerpool.

‘Good evening,’ he said.

Sir Magnus, who had been fiddling with the camera, smiling quietly to himself, as if he had not entirely failed to extract a passing thrill of pleasure from Betty Templer’s
crise,
looked up. Then he advanced across the room, his hand outstretched.

‘Kenneth,’ he said, ‘I did not expect to see you at this late hour. I thought you must have decided to drive straight to London. We have been taking some photographs.’

By that date, when the country had lived for some time under the threat of war, the traditional, the almost complete professional anonymity of the army in England had been already abrogated. Orders enacting that officers were never to be seen in London wearing uniform – certainly on no social occasion, nor, as a rule, even when there on duty – being to some extent relaxed, it was now not unknown for a Territorial, for example, to appear in khaki in unmilitary surroundings because he was on his way to or from a brief period of training. Something of the sort must have caused Widmerpool’s form of dress. His arrival at this hour was, in any case, surprising enough. The sight of him in uniform struck a chill through my bones. Nothing, up to that date, had so much brought home to me the imminence, the certitude, of war. That was not because Widmerpool himself looked innately military. On the contrary, he had almost the air of being about to perform a music-hall turn, sing a patriotic song or burlesque, with ‘patter’, an army officer. Perhaps that was only because the rest of the party were more or less in fancy dress. Even so, uniform, for some reason, brings out character, physique, class, even sex, in a curious manner. I had never before thought of Widmerpool as possessing physical characteristics at all feminine in disposition, but now his bulky, awkward shape, buttoned up and held together by a Sam Browne belt, recalled Heather Hopkins got up as an admiral in some act at the Merry Thought. Widmerpool was evidently at a loss, hopelessly at a loss, to know what was happening. He put his cap, leather gloves and a swagger stick bound in leather on the sideboard, having for some reason brought all these with him, instead of leaving them in the hall; possibly to make a more dramatic appearance. Sir Magnus introduced the Morelands. Widmerpool began to assert himself.

‘I have heard my medical man, Brandreth, speak of you, Mr Moreland,’ he said. ‘Don’t you play the piano? I think so. Now I recall, I believe, that we met in a nursing home where I was confined for a time with those vexatious boils. I found you in the passage one day, talking to Nicholas here. I believe you are one of Brandreth’s patients, too. He is an able fellow, Brandreth, if something of a gossip.’

‘I say, Kenneth, old boy,’ said Templer, who, in surprise at seeing Widmerpool at this moment in such an outfit, seemed to have forgotten, at least dismissed from his mind, his wife’s hysterical outburst, ‘are you going to make us all form fours?’

‘You are not very up to date, Peter,’ said Widmerpool, smiling at such a pitiful error. ‘The army no longer forms fours. You should surely know that. We have not done so for several years now. I cannot name the precise date of the Army Council Regulation. It is certainly by no means recent.’

‘Sorry,’ said Templer. ‘You must give us some squad drill later.’

‘You are very fortunate not to be faced with squad drill in any case,’ said Widmerpool severely, ‘it was touch and go. You may count yourself lucky that the recent formula was reached.’

Templer brought his heels together with a click. Widmerpool ignored this facetiousness. He turned to me.

‘Well, Nicholas,’ he said, ‘I did not know you were a Stourwater visitor. Can you explain to me why everyone is clad – or unclad – in this extraordinary manner?’

Sir Magnus took charge of him.

‘I am glad you were able to look in, Kenneth,’ he said. ‘We were taking a few photographs after dinner. Just the Seven Deadly Sins, you know. Like yourself, I am a believer in relaxation in these troublous times. It is absolutely necessary. You look very military, my dear fellow.’

‘I have been staying at my mother’s cottage,’ said Widmerpool, evidently gratified by Sir Magnus’s conciliatory tone. ‘I spent most of the afternoon with one of the other units in my Territorial division. I was doing a rather special job for our CO. There seemed no point in changing back into mufti. I find, too, that uniform makes a good impression these days. A sign of the times. However, I merely looked in to tell you, Magnus, that arrangements about the Swiss company are all but completed. There were no complications.’

‘This is old Bob’s affair, is it?’ said Templer. ‘I saw him last week. He was complaining about the markets. God knows, they’re awful.’

Templer, at that moment, was sitting on the edge of the dining-room table, with the opera-hat tipped to the back of his head. Having removed most of his clothes, he had wrapped a heavy rug around him, so that he might have been wearing some garment like an Inverness cape. He looked like a contemporary picture of a Victorian businessman on a journey.

‘Steel made a modest recovery,’ said Widmerpool, apparently mesmerised by this semi-professional garb of Templer’s into talking general business. ‘Then Copper has been receiving a fair amount of support. Also the Zinc-Lead group, with certain specific Tin shares. Still, it’s a sorry state of affairs. I’m keeping an eye on this calling-in of funds by non-clearing lenders.’

Even Sir Magnus himself was unable to resist this sudden switch to money-matters at Widmerpool’s entrance.

‘The discount houses are getting sixty-nine per cent of their applications for bills dated any day next week except Saturday at a price equal to a discount rate of practically twenty-five thirty-seconds per cent,’ he said.

‘What do you think about the rumours of Roosevelt devaluing the dollar, Magnus?’ asked Templer. ‘You don’t mind if I put a few more clothes on, here and now? It’s getting a shade chilly.’

‘I see the flight of funds to Wall Street as continuing,’ said Sir Magnus, speaking very quietly, ‘even though we have avoided war for the time being.’

That was an opinion I should have been prepared to hazard myself without laying claim to financial wizardry. Sir Magnus must have been unwilling to commit himself in front of Widmerpool. His words also carried the unmistakable note of implication that we should all go home.

‘Well, we have avoided war,’ said Widmerpool. ‘That is the important point. I myself think we are safe for five years at least. But – to get back to Duport – everything is going through the subsidiary company, as agreed. Duport will collect the material from the Turkish sellers on his own responsibility, and wire the Swiss company when he has enough ores for shipment.’

‘This ought to keep old Bob quiet for a bit,’ said Templer. ‘He does a job well when he’s at it, but goes to pieces if unemployed. He brought off some smart deals in manganese when he was in South America, so he is always telling me. Chromite is the main source of manganese, isn’t it? I’m no expert.’

‘Chromite—’ began Widmerpool.

‘And payments?’ asked Sir Magnus, not without emphasis.

‘I’ve opened an account for him through a local bank,’ said Widmerpool, ‘since you asked me to handle the credit formalities. That is agreeable to you, I hope. Duport can thereby undertake down-payments. We shall have to keep an eye on the European situation. In my opinion, as I said just now, it is going to steady up.’

‘Very good, Kenneth,’ said Sir Magnus, in a voice that closed the matter.

He began to fold up the stand of the flash lamp. The evening, for Sir Magnus’s visitors, was at an end. The girls, who had already gone off to clean themselves up, were now returning. There was some muttering between Templer and Anne Umfraville. Then she said good night all round, and retired from the dining-room.

‘I think I’d better go up too,’ said Templer. ‘See how Betty is getting on.’

He too said good night. There was a sound of laughter from the stairs, suggesting that Anne Umfraville had not yet reached her room.

‘Kenneth,’ said Sir Magnus, ‘I am going to ask you to take these friends of mine back in your car. It is not out of your way.’

‘Where do they live?’ asked Widmerpool, without bothering to assume even the most superficial veneer of pleasure, even resignation, at this prospect. ‘I was intending to take the short cut through the park.’

‘Peter kindly fetched them,’ said Sir Magnus, ‘but Betty is not feeling well this evening. Naturally he wants to attend to her.’

He was absolutely firm.

‘Come on, then,’ said Widmerpool, without geniality.

We thanked Sir Magnus profusely. He bowed us out. There was not much room in Widmerpool’s car. We charged insecurely through murky lanes.

‘What happened to Peter’s wife?’ asked Widmerpool. ‘She is rather delicate, isn’t she? I have hardly met her.’

We gave him some account of the Stourwater evening.

‘You seem all to have behaved in an extraordinary manner,’ said Widmerpool. ‘There is a side of Magnus of which I cannot altogether approve, his taste for buffoonery of that kind. I don’t like it myself, and you would be surprised at the stories such goings-on give rise to. Disgusting stories. Totally untrue, of course, but mud sticks. You know Magnus will sit up working now until two or three in the morning. I know his habits.’

‘What is wrong with Betty Templer?’ I asked.

‘I have been told that Peter neglects her,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I understand she has always been rather a silly girl. Someone should have thought of that before she became involved in your ragging. It was her husband’s place to look after her.’

We arrived at the Morelands’ cottage.

‘Come in and have a drink,’ said Moreland.

‘I never touch alcohol when I’m driving,’ said Widmerpool, ‘more especially when in uniform.’

‘A soft drink?’

‘Thanks, no.’

‘I’ll make you a cup of tea,’ said Matilda.

‘No, Mrs Moreland, I will push on.’

The car’s headlights illuminated a stretch of road; then the glare disappeared from sight. We moved into the house.

‘Who was that awful man?’ said Moreland.

‘You met him with me once in a nursing home.’

‘No recollection.’

‘What a party,’ said Isobel. ‘Some of it was rather enjoyable, all the same.’

‘What do you think of Stourwater?’ asked Matilda. ‘I find it really rather wonderful, in spite of everything.’

‘
Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons
,’ said Moreland.

‘But that was Cythera,’ said Isobel, ‘the island of love. Do you think love flourishes at Stourwater?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Moreland. ‘Love means such different things to different people.’

3

EVERY CHRISTMAS, as I have said, Albert used to send my mother a letter drafted in a bold, sloping, dowager’s hand, the mauve ink of the broad nib-strokes sinking deep, spreading, into the porous surface of the thick, creamy writing paper with scalloped edge. He had kept that up for years. This missive, composed in the tone of a dispatch from a distant outpost of empire, would contain a detailed account of his recent life, state of health, plans for the future. Albert expressed himself well on paper, with careful formality. In addition to these annual letters, he would, every three or four years, pay my mother a visit on his ‘day off’. These visits became rarer as he grew older. During the twenty-five years or so after we left Stonehurst, I saw him on such occasions twice, perhaps three times; one of these meetings was soon after the war, when I was still a schoolboy; another, just before ‘coming down’ from the university. Perhaps there was a third. I cannot be sure. Certainly, at our last encounter, I remember thinking Albert remarkably unchanged from Stonehurst days: fatter, undeniably, though on the whole additional flesh suited him. He had now settled down to be a fat man, with the professional fat man’s privileges and far from negligible status in life. He still supported a chronic weariness of spirit with an irony quite brutal in its unvarnished view of things. His dark-blue suit, assumed ceremonially for the call, gave him a rather distinguished appearance, brown canvas, rubber-soled shoes temporarily substituted for the traditional felt slippers (which one pictured as never renovated or renewed), adding a seedy, nearly sinister touch. He could have passed for a depressed, incurably indolent member of some royal house (there was a look of Prince Theodoric) in hopeless exile. The ‘girl from Bristol’ had taken him in hand, no doubt bullied him a bit, at the same time arranged a life in general tolerable for both of them. She had caused him to find employment in hotels where good wages were paid, good cooking relatively appreciated. There were two children, a boy and a girl. Albert himself was never greatly interested in either of them, while admitting they ‘meant a lot’ to his wife. It had been largely with a view to the children’s health and education that she had at last decided on moving to a seaside town (the resort, as it happened, where Moreland had once conducted the municipal orchestra), when opportunity was offered there to undertake the management of a small ‘private hotel’. Albert was, in principle, to do the cooking, his wife look after the housekeeping. It was a species of retirement, reflecting the ‘girl from Bristol’s’ energetic spirit.

To this establishment – which was called the Bellevue – Uncle Giles inevitably gravitated. Even if he had never heard of Albert, Uncle Giles would probably have turned up there sooner or later. His life was spent in such places – the Ufford, his
pied-à-terre
in Bayswater, the prototype – a phenomenal number of which must have housed him at one time or another throughout different parts of the United Kingdom.

‘Battered caravanserais,’ Uncle Giles used to say. ‘That’s what a fellow I met on board ship used to call the pubs he stayed in. From Omar Khayyam, you know. Not a bad name for ’em. Well-read man in his way. Wrote for the papers. Bit of a bounder. Stingy, too. Won the ship’s sweep and nobody saw a halfpenny back in hospitality.’

The position of Albert at the Bellevue offered a family connexion not to be disregarded, one to support a reasonable demand for that special treatment always felt by Uncle Giles to be unjustly denied him by fate and the malign efforts of ‘people who want to push themselves to the front’. Besides, the Bellevue offered a precinct where he could grumble to his heart’s content about his own family to someone who knew them personally. That was a rare treat. In addition, when Uncle Giles next saw any members of his family, he could equally grumble about Albert, complaining that his cooking had deteriorated, his manners become ‘offhand’. Uncle Giles did not visit the Bellevue often. Probably Albert, who had his own vicissitudes of temperament to contend with, did not care – family connexion or no family connexion – to accommodate so cantankerous a client there too frequently. He may have made intermittent excuses that the hotel was full to capacity. Whatever the reason, these occasional sojourns at the Bellevue were spaced out, for the most part, between Uncle Giles’s recurrent changes of employment, which grew no less frequent with the years. He continued to enjoy irritating his relations.

‘I like the little man they’ve got in Germany now,’ he would remark, quite casually.

This view, apparently so perverse in the light of Uncle Giles’s often declared radical principles, was in a measure the logical consequence of them. Dating to some extent from the post-war period, when to support Germany against France was the mark of liberal opinion, it had somehow merged with his approval of all action inimical to established institutions. National Socialism represented revolution; to that extent the movement gained the support, at any rate temporary support, of Uncle Giles. Besides, he shared Hitler’s sense of personal persecution, conviction that the world was against him. This was in marked contrast to the feeling of my brother-in-law, Erridge, also a declared enemy of established institutions, who devoted much of his energies to assisting propaganda against current German policies. Erridge, however, in his drift away from orthodox Communism after his own experiences in Spain, had become an increasingly keen ‘pacifist’, so that he was, in practice, as unwilling to oppose Germany by force of arms as Uncle Giles himself.

‘We don’t want guns,’ Erridge used to say. ‘We want to make the League of Nations effective.’

The death of the Tollands’ stepmother, Lady Warminster, a year or two before, with the consequent closing down of Hyde Park Gardens as an establishment, caused a re-grouping of the members of the Tolland family who had lived there. This had indirectly affected Erridge, not as a rule greatly concerned with the lives of his brothers and sisters. When Lady Warminster’s household came to an end, Blanche, Robert and Hugo Tolland had to find somewhere else to live, a major physical upheaval for them. Even for the rest of the family, Lady Warminster’s death snapped a link with the past that set the state of childhood at a further perspective, forced her stepchildren to look at life in rather a different manner. Ties with their stepmother, on the whole affectionate, had never been close in her lifetime. Death emphasised their comparative strength: Norah Tolland, especially, who had never ‘got on’ very well with Lady Warminster, now losing no opportunity of asserting – with truth – that she had possessed splendid qualities. Although widow of two relatively rich men, Lady Warminster left little or no money of her own. There were some small bequests to relations, friends and servants. Blanche Tolland received the residue. She had always been the favourite of her stepmother, who may have felt that Blanche’s ‘dottiness’ required all financial support available. However, when the point of departure came, Blanche’s future posed no problem. Erridge suggested she should keep house for him at Thrubworth. His butler, Smith, had also died at about that moment – ‘in rather horrible circumstances’, Erridge wrote – and he had decided that he needed a woman’s help in running the place.

‘Smith is the second butler Erry has killed under him,’ said Norah. ‘You’d better take care, Blanchie.’

Since his brief adventure with Mona, Erridge had shown no further sign of wanting to marry, even to associate himself with another woman at all intimately. That may have been partly because his health had never wholly recovered from the dysentery incurred in Spain: another reason why his sister’s care was required. This poor state of health Erridge – always tending to hypochondria – now seemed to welcome, perhaps feeling that to become as speedily as possible a chronic invalid would be some insurance against the need to take a decision in the insoluble problem of how to behave if hostilities with Germany were to break out.

‘I have become a sick man,’ he used to say, on the rare occasions when any of his family visited Thrubworth. ‘I don’t know at all how long I am going to last.’

Robert Tolland had lived in his stepmother’s house, partly through laziness, partly from an ingrained taste for economy; at least those were the reasons attributed by his brothers and sisters. At her death, Robert took a series of small flats on his own, accommodation he constantly changed, so that often no one knew in the least where he was to be found. In short, Robert’s life became more mysterious than ever. Hitherto, he had been seen from time to time at Hyde Park Gardens Sunday luncheon-parties; now, except for a chance glimpse at a theatre or a picture gallery, he disappeared from sight entirely, personal relationship with him in general reduced to an occasional telephone call. Hugo Tolland, the youngest brother, also passed irretrievably into a world of his own. He continued to be rather successful as assistant to Mrs Baldwyn Hodges in her second-hand furniture and decorating business, where, one afternoon, he sold a set of ormolu candlesticks to Max Pilgrim, the pianist and cabaret entertainer, who was moving into a new flat. When Hyde Park Gardens closed down, Hugo announced that he was going to share this flat. There was even a suggestion – since engagements of the kind in which he had made his name were less available than formerly – that Pilgrim might put some money into Mrs Baldwyn Hodges’s firm and himself join the business.

Among her small bequests, Lady Warminster left her sister, Molly Jeavons, the marquetry cabinet in which she kept the material for her books, those rambling, unreviewed, though not entirely unreadable, historical studies of dominating women. The Maria Theresa manuscript, last of these biographies upon which she had worked, remained uncompleted, because Lady Warminster admitted – expressing the matter, of course, in her own impenetrably oblique manner – she had taken a sudden dislike to the Empress on reading for the first time of her heartless treatment of prostitutes. Although they used to see relatively little of each other, Molly Jeavons was greatly distressed at her sister’s death. No greater contrast could be imagined than the staid, even rather despondent atmosphere of Hyde Park Gardens, and the devastating muddle and hustle of the Jeavons house in South Kensington, but it was mistaken to suppose these antitheses precisely reproduced the opposing characters of the two sisters. Lady Warminster had a side that took pleasure in the tumbledown aspects of life: journeys to obscure fortune-tellers in the suburbs, visits out of season to dowdy seaside hotels. It was, indeed, remarkable that she had never found her way to the Bellevue. Molly Jeavons, on the other hand, might pass her days happily enough with a husband as broken down, as unemployable, as untailored, as Ted Jeavons, while she ran a kind of free hotel for her relations, a rest-home for cats, dogs and other animals that could impose themselves on her good nature; Molly, too, was capable of enjoying other sides of life. She had had occasional bursts of magnificence as Marchioness of Sleaford, whatever her first marriage may have lacked in other respects.

‘The first year they were married,’ Chips Lovell said, ‘the local Hunt Ball was held at Dogdene. Molly, aged eighteen or nineteen, livened up the proceedings by wearing the Sleaford tiara – which I doubt if Aunt Alice has ever so much as tried on – and the necklace belonging to Tippoo Sahib that Uncle Geoffrey’s grandfather bought for his Spanish mistress when he outbid Lord Hertford on that famous occasion.’

For some reason there was a great deal of fuss about moving the marquetry cabinet from Hyde Park Gardens to South Kensington. The reason for these difficulties was obscure, although it was true that not an inch remained in the Jeavons house for the accommodation of an additional piece of furniture.

‘Looks as if I shall have to push the thing round myself on a barrow,’ said Jeavons, speaking gloomily of this problem.

Then, one day in the summer after ‘Munich’, when German pressure on Poland was at its height, Uncle Giles died too – quite suddenly of a stroke – while staying at the Bellevuc.

‘Awkward to the end,’ my father said, ‘though I suppose one should not speak in that way.’

It was certainly an inconvenient moment to choose. During the year that had almost passed since Isobel and I had stayed with the Morelands, everyday life had become increasingly concerned with preparations for war: expansion of the services, air-raid precautions, the problems of evacuation; no one talked of anything else. My father, in poor health after being invalided out of the army a dozen years before (indirect result of the wound incurred in Mesopotamia), already racked with worry by the well-justified fear that he would be unfit for re-employment if war came, was at that moment in no state to oversee his brother’s cremation. I found myself charged with that duty. There was, indeed, no one else to do the job. By universal consent, Uncle Giles was to be cremated, rather than buried. In the first place, no specially apposite spot awaited his coffin; in the second, a crematorium was at hand in the town where he died. Possibly another feeling, too, though unspoken, influenced that decision: a feeling that fire was the element appropriate to his obsequies, the funeral pyre traditional to the nomad.

I travelled down to the seaside town in the afternoon. Isobel was not feeling well. She was starting a baby. Circumstances were not ideal for a pregnancy. Apart from unsettled international conditions, the weather was hot, too hot. I felt jumpy, irritable. In short, to be forced to undertake this journey in order to dispose of the remains of Uncle Giles seemed the last straw in making life tedious, disagreeable, threatening, through no apparent fault of one’s own. I had never seen much of Uncle Giles, felt no more than formal regret that he was no longer among us. There seemed no justice in the fact that fate had willed this duty to fall on myself. At the same time, I had to admit things might have been worse. Albert – more probably his wife – had made preliminary arrangements for the funeral, after informing my father of Uncle Giles’s death. I should stay at the Bellevue, where I was known; where, far more important, Uncle Giles was known. He probably owed money, but there would be no uneasiness. Albert would have no fears about eventual payment. It was true that some embarrassing fact might be revealed: with Uncle Giles, to be prepared for the unexpected in some more or less disagreeable form was always advisable. Albert, burdened with few illusions on any subject, certainly possessed none about Uncle Giles; he would grasp the situation even if there were complexities. I could do what clearing up was required, attend the funeral, return the following morning. There was no real excuse for grumbling. All the same, I felt a certain faint-heartedness at the prospect of meeting Albert again after all these years, a fear – rather a base one – that he might produce embarrassing reminiscences of my own childhood. That was very contemptible. A moment’s serious thought would have shown me that nothing was less likely. Albert was interested in himself, not in other people. That did not then occur to me. My trepidation was increased by the fact that I had never yet set eyes on the ‘girl from Bristol’, of whom her husband had always painted so alarming a picture. She was called ‘Mrs Creech’, because Albert, strange as it might seem, was named ‘Albert Creech’. The suffix ‘Creech’ sounded to my ears unreal, incongruous, rather impertinent, like suddenly attaching a surname to one of the mythical figures of Miss Orchard’s stories of the gods and goddesses, or Mr Deacon’s paintings of the Hellenic scene. Albert, I thought, was like Sisyphus or Charon, one of those beings committed eternally to undesired and burdensome labours. Charon was more appropriate, since Albert had, as it were, recently ferried Uncle Giles over the Styx. I do not attempt to excuse these frivolous, perhaps rather heartless, reflections on my own part as I was carried along in the train.