The kindly ones (7 page)

My father, although he would never have admitted as much to Uncle Giles, was inclined to agree with his brother in the view that General Conyers would be a more dignified figure if he accepted for himself a less universal scope of interests; so that when the General began to make inquiries about the Stonehurst ‘ghost’, my father tried to dismiss the subject out of hand.

‘A lot of nonsense, General,’ he said, ‘I assure you.’

General Conyers would have none of that.

‘External agency,’ he said, ‘that’s the point. Find it hard to believe in actual entities myself. Ought to be looked into more. One heard some strange stories when one was in India. The East is full of that sort of thing – a lot pure invention, of course.’

‘I believe ghosts are thought-forms,’ said Mrs Conyers, as if that settled the whole matter.

‘If you are experiencing hallucination,’ said her husband, ‘then something must cause the hallucination. Telepathic side, too, of course. I’ve never had the opportunity to cross-question first-hand someone who’d seen a ghost. What sort of a girl is this parlourmaid of yours?’

‘Oh, please don’t cross-question her,’ said my mother. ‘We have such dreadful difficulties in getting servants here, and we are losing Albert as it is. She is not by any means a girl. You will see her waiting at table. Very hysterical. All the same, the maid we had before used to tell the same story.’

‘Indeed? Did she? Did she?’

‘I must say I think there is something peculiar about the house myself,’ said my mother. ‘I shall not be altogether sorry when the time comes to leave it.’

‘What about the people who let it to you?’

‘The fellow who built the place is dead,’ said my father, now determined to change the subject, come what may. ‘The lease was arranged through executors. We got it rather cheap on that account. He was in the Indian Army – Madras cavalry, I believe. What do you think about the reorganisations in India, by the way, General? Some people say the latest concentrations of command are not working too well.’

‘We want mobility, mobility, and yet more mobility,’ said General Conyers, ‘in India and everywhere else, more especially since the Baghdad Agreement. If the Germans continue the railway to Basra, that amounts to our recognising the northern area of Mesopotamia as a German sphere of influence.’

‘How much does Mesopotamia matter?’ enquired my father, unaware that he would soon be wounded there.

‘Depends on when and where Germany decides to attack.’

‘That will be soon, you think?’

‘Between the Scylla of her banking system, and the Charybdis of her Socialist Party, Germany has no alternative.’

My father nodded respectfully, at the same time a trifle ironically. Although, in principle, he certainly agreed that war must come sooner or later – indeed, he was often saying it would come sooner – I am not sure that he truly believed his own words. He did not, indeed, much care for talking politics, national or international, unless in the harmless form of execration of causes disliked by himself. Certainly he had no wish to hear strategic situations expressed in classical metaphor, with which he was not greatly at ease. He had merely spoken of the Indian Army as a preferable alternative to discussing the Stonehurst ‘ghosts’. The General, however, showed no sign of wishing to abandon this new subject.

‘One of these fine mornings the Germans will arrive over here,’ he said, ‘or walk into France. Can’t blame them if they do. Everyone is asking for it. We shall be squabbling with the Irish, or having a coal strike, or watching cricket. In France, Cabinet Ministers will be calling each other out to duels, while their wives discharge pistols at newspaper editors. And when the Germans come, it will be a big show – Clausewitz’s Nation in Arms.’

‘Able fellow, Clausewitz,’ my father conceded.

‘You remember he said that war was in the province of chance?’

‘I do, General.’

‘We are a great deal too fond of accepting that principle in this country,’ said General Conyers. ‘All the same, I thank God for the mess we made in South Africa. That brought a few people to their senses. Even the Treasury.’

My father, equally unwilling to admit the Boer War to have been prosecuted without notable brilliance, or that the light of reason or patriotism could penetrate, in however humble a degree, into the treasonable madhouse of the Treasury, did not answer. He gave a kind of half-sneer, half-grunt. I think my mother must have thought there had been enough talk of war for the time being, because she suggested a return to the house. The hour of luncheon was in any case approaching. I departed to the nursery.

‘Everyone’s in a taking today,’ said Edith, herself rather ruffled when I arrived at table. ‘I don’t know what has come over the house. It’s all your Uncle Giles coming to stay without warning, I suppose. Albert says it’s just like him. Now, don’t begin making a fuss because the gravy is too thick. I haven’t given you much of it.’

In the subsequent rather sensational events of the afternoon, I played no direct part. They were told to me later, piecemeal; most of the detail revealed by my mother only many years after. She herself could never repeat the story without her eyes filling with tears, caused partly by laughter, perhaps partly by other memories of that time. All the same, my mother always used to insist that there had been nothing to laugh about at the moment when the incident took place. Then her emotion had been shock, even fear. The disturbing scene in question was enacted while Edith and I were out for our traditional Sunday ‘walk’, which took its usual form that afternoon of crossing the Common. We were away from home about an hour and a half, perhaps two hours. Meanwhile, my parents and their guests had moved from dining-room to drawing-room, after what was agreed later to rank as one of the best meals Albert had ever cooked.

‘Aylmer Conyers does love his food,’ my mother used to say.

When announcing that fact, she would speak as if kindly laughter were the only possible manner of passing off lightly so distressing a frailty in friend or relation. Indeed, the General’s pride in his own appreciation of the pleasures of the table was regarded by people like my parents, in the fashion of that day, as a tendency to talk rather more than was decent of eating and drinking. On this occasion he had certainly been full of praise for Albert. Possibly his eulogies continued too long entirely to please my father, who grew easily tired of hearing another man, even his own cook, too protractedly commended. Besides, apart from anything he might feel about the General, the impending arrival of Uncle Giles had justifiably set my father’s nerves on edge, in fact thoroughly upset him. As a result he was very fretful by the middle of the afternoon. He freely admitted that afterwards; feeling, indeed, always rather proud of being easily irritated. Mrs Conyers and my mother, come to the end of their gossip, had begun to discuss knitting techniques. Conversation between the two men must have dragged, because the General returned to Near Eastern affairs.

‘We haven’t heard the last of Enver and his Young Turks,’ he said.

‘Not by a long chalk,’ agreed my father.

‘You remember Skobeloff’s dictum?’

‘Quite so, General, quite so.’

My father rarely, if ever, admitted to ignorance. He could, in any case, be pretty certain of the calibre of any such quotation offered in the circumstances. However, the General was determined there should be no misunderstanding.

‘The road to Constantinople leads through the Brandenburger Tor.’

My father had visited Munich, never Berlin. He was, therefore, possibly unaware of the precise locality of the monument to which Skobeloff referred. However, he could obviously grasp the gist of such an assertion in the mouth of one he rightly judged to be a Russian general, linking the aphorism immediately in his own mind with the recent Turkish request for a German officer of high rank to reorganise the Ottoman forces.

‘If Liman von Sanders—’ began my father.

He never finished the sentence. The name of that militarily celebrated, endlessly discussed, internationally disputed, Britannically unacceptable, German General-Inspector of the Turkish Army was caught, held, crystallised in mid-air. Just as the words left my father’s lips, the door of the drawing-room opened quietly. Billson stood on the threshold for a split second. Then she entered the room. She was naked.

‘It’s always easy to be wise after the event.’ My mother used invariably to repeat that saying when the incident was related – and it was to be related pretty often in years to come – implying thereby criticism of herself. Her way was habitually to accept responsibilities which she considered by their nature to be her own, her firm belief being that most difficulties in life could be negotiated by tactful handling. In this case, she ever afterwards regarded herself to blame in having failed to notice earlier that morning that things were far from well with Billson. My mother had, it was true, suspected during luncheon that something was amiss, but by then such suspicion was too late. Billson’s waiting at table that day had been perceptibly below – a mere parody of – her accustomed standard. Indeed, her shortcomings in that field had even threatened to mar the good impression otherwise produced on the guests by Albert’s cooking. Not only had she proffered vegetables to the General in a manner so entirely lacking in style that he had let fall a potato on the carpet, but she had also caused Mrs Conyers to ‘jump’ painfully – no doubt in unconscious memory of her father’s hoaxes – by dropping a large silver ladle on a Sheffield plate dish-cover. Later, when she brought in the coffee, Billson ‘banged down’ the tray as if it were red-hot, ‘scuttling’ from the room.

‘I made up my mind to speak to her afterwards about it,’ my mother said. ‘I thought she wasn’t looking at all well. I knew she was a great
malade imaginaire,
but, after all, she had seen the ghost, and her nerves are not at all good. It really is not fair on servants to expect them to sleep in a haunted room, although I have to myself. Where else could we put her? She can’t be more frightened than I am sometimes. Then Aylmer Conyers stared at her so dreadfully with those very bright blue eyes of his. I was not at all surprised that she was nervous. I was terrified myself that he was going to begin asking her about the ghost, especially after she had made him drop the potatoes on the floor.’

In short, Billson’s maladroitness had been judged to be no more than a kind of minor derangement to be expected from her for at least twenty-four hours after her ‘experience’, although, as I have said, listening in the first instance to the story about the ‘ghost’, my mother had been pleased, surprised even, by the calm with which Billson had spoken of the apparition.

‘I really thought familiarity was breeding contempt,’ said my mother. ‘I certainly hoped so, with parlourmaids so terribly hard to come by.’

Albert’s announcement of impending marriage was scarcely taken into account. Probably Billson’s passion for him had never been accepted very seriously – as, indeed, few passions are by those not personally suffering from them. Possibly I myself knew more of it, from hints dropped by Edith, than did my mother. On top of everything, the prospective arrival of Uncle Giles had distracted attention from whatever else was happening in the house. However, even if the extent of Billson’s distress at Albert’s decision to marry had been adequately gauged – added, as it were morally speaking, to the probable effect of seeing a ghost that morning – no one could have foreseen so complete, so deplorable, a breakdown.

‘I thought it was the end of the world,’ my mother said.

I do not know to what extent she intended this phrase, so far as her own amazement was concerned, to be taken literally. My mother’s transcendental beliefs were direct, yet imaginative, practical, though possessing the simplicity of complete acceptance. She may have meant to imply, no more, no less, that for a second of time she herself truly believed the Last Trump (unheard in the drawing-room) had sounded in the kitchen, instantly metamorphosing Billson into one of those figures – risen from the tomb, given up by the sea, swept in from the ends of the earth – depicted in primitive paintings of the Day of Judgment. If, indeed, my mother thought that, she must also have supposed some awful, cataclysmic division from on High just to have taken place, violently separating Sheep from Goats, depriving Billson of her raiment. No doubt my mother used only a figure of speech, but circumstances gave a certain aptness to the metaphor.

‘Joking apart,’ my mother used to say, ‘it was a dreadful moment.’

There can be no doubt whatever that the scene was disturbing, terrifying, saddening, a moment that summarised, in the unclothed figure of Billson, human lack of coordination and abandonment of self-control in the face of emotional misery. Was she determined, in the habit of neurotics, to try to make things as bad for others as for herself? In that, she largely succeeded. There seemed no solution for the people in the room, no way out of the problem so violently posed by Billson in the shape of her own nude person. My father always confessed afterwards that he himself had been utterly at a loss. He could throw no light whatever on the reason why such a thing should suddenly have happened in his drawing-room, see no way of cutting short this unspeakable crisis. In telling – and re-telling – the highlights of the story, he contributed only one notable phrase.

‘She was stark,’ he used to say, ‘
absolutely stark.’

This was a relatively small descriptive ornament to the really vast saga that accumulated round the incident; at the same time, it was for some reason not without a certain narrative force.

‘I’ve come to give notice, m’m,’ Billson said. ‘I don’t want to stay if Albert is leaving your service, and besides, m’m, I can’t stand the ghosts no longer.’

Stonehurst, as I have said, was a ‘furnished’ house, the furniture, together with pictures, carpets, curtains, all distinctly on the seedy side, all part of the former home of people not much interested in what the rooms they lived in looked like. However, India, one way and another, provided a recurrent theme that gave a certain cohesion to an otherwise undistinguished, even anarchic style of decoration. In the hall, the brass gong was suspended from the horn or tusk of some animal; in the dining-room hung water-colours of the Ganges at Benares, the Old Fort at Calcutta, the Taj Mahal; in the smoking-room, a small revolving bookcase contained only four books: Marie Corelli’s
Sorrows of Satan,
St John Clarke’s
Never to the Philistines,
an illustrated volume of light verse called
Lays of Ind,
a volume of coloured pictures of Sepoy uniforms; in the drawing-room, the piano was covered with a Kashmir shawl of some size and fine texture, upon which, in silver frames, photographs of the former owner of Stonehurst (wearing a pith helmet surmounted with a spike) and his family (flanked by Indian servants) had stood before being stowed away in a drawer.