The kindly ones (9 page)

‘I was admiring your new motor-car, General,’ he said. ‘Hope it is not bringing you as much trouble as most of them seem to cause their owners.’

Now that Dr Trelawney was out of the way, my parents moved towards the car themselves, perhaps partly to keep an eye on Uncle Giles in his relations with the General, still lost in reflection.

‘Thought I’d better not introduce you,’ said General Conyers, straightening himself as they came up to him. ‘One never knows how people may feel about a fellow like Trelawney – especially if he lives in the neighbourhood. Not everybody cares for him. You hear some funny stories. I find him interesting myself. Nasty habits, some people say. Can’t believe a word he says, of course. We met him years ago with a fellow I used to know in the Buffs who’d taken up yoga.’

The General lifted the starting-handle from the floor of the car.

‘Are you an expert in these machines, Giles?’ he asked.

He used the tone of one speaking to a child, not at all the manner of an equal in which he had addressed me earlier in the day. Knowing all about Uncle Giles, he was clearly determined not to allow himself to be irritated by him.

‘Never driven one in my life,’ said Uncle Giles. ‘Not too keen on ’em. Always in accidents. Some royalty in a motorcar have been involved in a nasty affair today. Heard the news in Aldershot. Fellow I went to see was told on the telephone. Amazing, isn’t it, hearing so soon. They’ve just assassinated an Austrian archduke down in Bosnia. Did it today. Only happened a few hours ago.’

Uncle Giles muttered, almost whispered these facts, speaking as if he were talking to himself, not at all in the voice of a man announcing to the world in general the close of an epoch; the outbreak of Armageddon; the birth of a new, uneasy age. He did not look in the least like the harbinger of the Furies.

‘Franz-Ferdinand?’ asked General Conyers sharply.

‘And his morganatic wife. Shot ’em both.’

‘When did you say this happened?’

‘This afternoon.’

‘And they’re both dead?’

‘Both of them.’

‘There will be trouble about this,’ said the General.

He inserted the starting-handle and gave several terrific turns.

‘Bad trouble,’ he said. ‘They’ll have to postpone tomorrow night’s State Ball. Not a doubt of it. This was a Servian, I suppose.’

‘They think so.’

‘Was he an anarchist?’ asked Mrs Conyers.

‘One of those fellows,’ said Uncle Giles.

‘Mark my words,’ said General Conyers, ‘this is a disaster. Well, the engine has started. We’d better be off in case it stops again. Good-bye to you both, thank you again enormously. No, no, not another word. I only hope the whole matter settles down all right. Good-bye, Giles. Good-bye, Nicholas. I don’t at all like the news.’

They went off down the hill. We all waved. My mother looked worried.

‘I don’t like the news either,’ she said.

‘Let me carry your bag, Giles,’ said my father. ‘You’ll find things in a bit of a muddle in the house. One of the maids had an hysterical attack this afternoon.

‘I don’t expect it’s too easy to get staff up here,’ said Uncle Giles. ‘Is Bracey still your servant? Albert still cooking for you? You’re lucky to have them both. Hope I see something of them. Very difficult to get yourself properly looked after these days. Several things I want to talk about. Rather an awkward situation. I think you may be able to help.’

The whole party was moving towards the house. Edith, who had been standing in the background, now detached me from the grown-ups. We diverged to the nursery. I suppose my father, in the course of the evening, helped to sort out the awkward situation, because Uncle Giles left the following day. No one yet realised that the Mute with the Bowstring stood at the threshold of the door, that, if they wanted to get anything done in time of peace, they must be quick about it. Already, the sands had almost run out. The doctor, for example, ordered a ‘complete holiday’ for Billson. Inquiries revealed that she had gone to rest in her room that afternoon, where, contemplating her troubles, she had fallen asleep to awaken later in a ‘state’, greatly disturbed, but about which she could otherwise remember little or nothing. No doubt one of those nervous shifts of control had taken place within herself, later to be closely studied, then generally regarded as a sudden display of ‘dottiness’. It was, of course, agreed that she must go. Billson herself was insistent on that point. That decision on both sides was to be expected. Although the story passed immediately into legend, surprisingly little fuss was made about it at the time. A few days later – while the chancelleries of Europe entered into a ferment of activity – Billson, escorted by Edith, quietly travelled to Suffolk, where her family could take care of her for a time. Left alone with my mother during Edith’s absence from home on that occasion, I first heard a fairly full and reliable account of the story, fragments of which had, of course, already reached me in more or less garbled versions, from other sources. A long time passed before all the refinements of the saga were recorded and classified.

I do not know for certain what happened to Billson. Even my mother, with all her instinct for not losing touch with the unfortunate, lost sight of her during the war. More than thirty years later, however, what may have been a clue took shape. When Rosie Manasch – or Rosie Udall, as she had then become – used to hold a kind of salon in her house in Regent’s Park, she often told stories of a ‘daily’ she had employed during or just after the war, a former parlourmaid of the old-fashioned kind, who liked to talk about the people for whom she had worked. By then she was called ‘Doreen’, and said she was nearly seventy.

‘She looked years younger,’ Rosie said, ‘perhaps in her fifties. A man behaved badly to her. I could never make out if he was a butler or a chef. She also had some rather good ghost-stories when she was on form.’

It was all too complicated to explain to Rosie, but this legendary lost love might well have been Albert incorporated – in the way myths are formed – with Billson’s earlier ‘disappointment’. Albert himself, as might be expected, was greatly outraged by Billson’s behaviour that Sunday afternoon, even though he himself had suffered no inconvenience from the immediate circumstances of her ‘breakdown’.

‘I told you that girl would go off her crumpet,’ he said more than once afterwards.

No doubt a series of ‘funny days’ would normally have been induced in Bracey, but, as things turned out, neither he nor Albert had much time to brood over Billson’s surprising conduct. International events took their swift, their ominous, course, Bracey, characteristically, being swept into a world of action, Albert, firm as ever in his fight for the quiet life, merely changing the locality of his cooking-pots. To my mother, Mrs Conyers wrote:

‘… I was
so glad
Aylmer did not make you meet that
very rum
friend of his with the beard. He would have been quite capable of introducing you! I do not encourage him to see
too much
of that person. I think between you and me there is something
very odd
about the man. I would rather you did not mention to anyone – unless you know them
very well
– that Aylmer sometimes talks of staying with
him.
Nothing would induce
me
to go! I do not think that Aylmer will ever pay the visit because he feels sure the house will be
very uncomfortable.
No bathroom! What a
dreadful
thing this murder in Austria-Hungary is. Aylmer is very much afraid it may lead to war…’

General Conyers was right. Not many weeks later – by that time my father and Bracey had been shipped to France with the Expeditionary Force – squads of recruits began to appear on the Common, their evolutions in the heather performed in scarlet or dark blue, for in those early days of the war there were not enough khaki uniforms to go round. Some wore their own cloth caps over full-dress tunics or marched along in column of fours dressed in subfusc civilian suits, so that once more the colour values of the heath were transformed. These exercises of ‘Kitchener’s Army’ greatly perturbed Albert, although his ‘feet’ precluded any serious suggestion of military service. He used to discuss with Gullick, the gardener, the advisability of offering himself, ‘feet’ or no ‘feet’, in the service of his country.

‘If you don’t volunteer, they’ll come and take you,’ he would say, ‘they’re going to put the blokes who haven’t volunteered at the head of the column and march ’em along in their shame without any buttons to their uniforms – just to show they had to be forced to join.’

Gullick, silent, elderly, wizened, himself too old to be called to the colours except in the direst need, nodded grimly, showing no disposition to dissent from the menacing possibilities put forward.

‘And I’ll soon be a married man too,’ said Albert, groaning aloud.

However, like my father, Uncle Giles and General Conyers, Albert survived the war. He spent melancholy years cooking in some large canteen, where there was no alternative to producing food at a level painful to his own standards. When peace came at last, he felt, perhaps justly, that he had suffered as much as many who had performed, at least outwardly, more onerous acts of service and sacrifice. He used to write to my mother every Christmas. The dreaded marriage turned out – as Albert himself put it –’no worse than most’. It appeared, indeed, better than many. Others were less fortunate. Bracey’s ‘funny days’ came to an end when he was killed in the retreat – or, as we should now say, the withdrawal – from Mons. The Fenwicks’ father was killed; Mary Barber’s father was killed; Richard Vaughan’s father was killed; the Westmacott twins’ father was killed. Was the Military Policeman who used to jog across the heather killed? Perhaps his duties kept him away from the line. Did the soldier who chopped off his trigger-finger save his own life by doing so? It is an interesting question. Dr Trelawney gave up his house. Edith was told by Mrs Gullick that she had heard as a fact that he had been shot as a spy at the Tower of London. We left Stonehurst and its ‘ghosts’, inexplicably mysterious bungalow, presaging other inexplicable mysteries of life and death. I never heard whether subsequent occupants were troubled, as Billson and others had been troubled, by tall white spectres, uncomfortable invisible presences. Childhood was brought suddenly, even rather brutally, to a close. Albert’s shutters may have kept out the suffragettes: they did not effectively exclude the Furies.

2

IT IS ODD TO THINK THAT ONLY FOURTEEN or fifteen years after leaving Stonehurst, essentially a haunt of childhood, I should have been sitting with Moreland in the Hay Loft, essentially a haunt of maturity: odd, in that such an appalling volume of unavoidable experience had to be packed into the intervening period before that historical necessity could be enacted. Perhaps maturity is not quite the word; anyway, childhood had been left behind. It was early one Sunday morning in the days when Moreland and I first knew each other. We were discussing the roots and aims of action. The Hay Loft – now no more – was an establishment off the Tottenham Court Road, where those kept up late by business or pleasure could enjoy rather especially good bacon-and-eggs at any hour of the night. Rarely full at night-time, the place remained closed, I think, during the day. Certainly I never heard of anyone’s eating there except in the small hours. The waiter, white-haired and magisterial, a stage butler more convincing than any to be found in private service, would serve the bacon-and-eggs with a flourish to sulky prostitutes, who, nocturnal liabilities at an end, infiltrated the supper-room towards dawn. Moreland and I had come from some party in the neighbourhood, displeasing, yet for some reason hard to vacate earlier. Moreland had been talking incessantly – by then a trifle incoherently – on the theme that action, stemming from sluggish, invisible sources, moves towards destinations no less indefinable.

‘If action is to be one’s aim,’ he was saying, ‘then is it action to write a symphony satisfactory to oneself, which no one else wants to perform, or a comic song every errand-boy whistles? A bad example – a comic song, obviously. Nothing I should like to do better, if I had the talent. Say some ghastly, pretentious half-baked imitation of Stravinsky that makes a hit and is hailed as genius. We know it’s bad art. That is not the point. Is it action? Or
is
that the point? Is art action, an alternative to action, the enemy of action, or nothing whatever to do with action? I have no objection to action. I merely find it impossible to locate.’

‘Ask the Surrealists. They are keen on action. Their magazine had a photograph on the cover the other day with the caption:
One of our contributors insulting a priest.’

‘Exactly,’ said Moreland. ‘Violence – revolt – sweep away the past. Abandon bourgeois values. Don’t be a prisoner of outworn dogmas. I’m told on all sides that’s how one should behave, that I must live intensely. Besides, the abominable question of musical interpretation eternally bedevils a composer’s life. What could make one brood on action more than a lot of other people taking over when it comes to performance, giving the rendering of the work least sympathetic to yourself?’

‘You might say that happens in love, too, when the other person takes charge of the performance in a manner unsympathetic to yourself.’

‘All right,’ said Moreland, ‘love, then. Is it better to love somebody and not have them, or have somebody and not love them? I mean from the point of view of action – living intensely. Does action consist in having or loving? In having – naturally – it might first appear. Loving is just emotion, not action at all. But is that correct? I’m not sure.’

‘It is a question Barnby would consider absurd.’

‘Nevertheless, I put it to you. Can the mere haver be said to live more intensely than the least successful lover? That is if action
is
to live with intensity. Or is action only when you bring off both – loving and having – leaving your money on, so to speak, like a double-event in racing. Speaking for myself, I get the worst of all worlds, failing to have the people I love, wasting time over the others, whom I equally fail to have.’

‘You should commit a
crime passionnel
to liven things up.’

‘When I read about
crimes passionnels
in the papers,’ said Moreland, scraping his plate from which the last vestige of egg had already been long removed, ‘I am struck not by the richness of the emotions, but by their desperate poverty. On the surface, the people concerned may seem to live with intensity. Underneath, is an abject egotism and lack of imagination.’

‘Stendhal did not think so. He said he would rather his wife tried to stab him twice a year than greeted him every evening with a sour face.’

‘Still, he remained unmarried. I’ve no doubt my own wife will do both. Besides, Stendhal was equally keen on the glance, the kiss, the squeeze of the hand. He was not really taken in by the tyranny of action.’

‘But surely some
crimes passionnels
are fascinating. Suppose one of his girls murdered Sir Magnus Donners in fantastic circumstances – I leave the setting to your own fevered imagination.’

‘Now, Sir Magnus Donners,’ said Moreland. ‘Is he a man of action? In the eyes of the world, certainly. But does he, in fact, live intensely?’

‘Like Stendhal, he has never married.’

‘Hardly a
sine qua non
of action,’ said Moreland, now rubbing the plate with a lump of bread.

‘But a testing experience, surely. The baronet’s wife’s subsequent married life with the gamekeeper opens up more interesting possibilities than any of their adulterous frolics.’

‘D. H. Lawrence’s ideas about sexual stimulation,’ said Moreland, ‘strike me as no less unreal – no less artificial, if you prefer-than any attributed to Sir Magnus Donners. Suburban, narcissistic daydreams, a phallic never-never-land for middle-aged women. However, that is beside the point, which is that I grant, within the sphere of marriage and family life, Sir Magnus has not lived intensely. Setting marriage aside, on the other hand, he has built up a huge fortune, risen to all but the highest peaks in politics, appreciates the arts in a coarse but perfectly genuine manner, always has a succession of pretty girls in tow. Is he to be styled no man of action because he has never married? The proposition is absurd. After all, we are not married ourselves.’

‘And, what’s more, must cease to live intensely. It’s nearly three o’clock.’

‘So it is. How time flies.’

‘Raining, too.’

‘And the buses have stopped.’

‘We will return to action on another occasion.’

‘Certainly, we will.’

The interest of this conversation, characteristic of Moreland in a discursive mood, lay, of course, in the fact that he subsequently married Matilda Wilson, one of Sir Magnus’s ‘girls’. The modest account he gave during this discussion at the Hay Loft of his own exploits at that period probably did Moreland less than justice. He was not unattractive to women. At the same time, his own romantic approach to emotional relationships had already caused him to take some hard knocks in that very knockabout sphere. At the moment when we were eating bacon-and-eggs, neither Moreland nor I had yet heard of Matilda. In those days, I think, she had not even come the way of Sir Magnus himself. In fact, that was about the stage in her life when she was married to Carolo, the violinist, a marriage undertaken when she was very young, lasting only about eighteen months. However, ‘the great industrialist’ – as Barnby used to call Sir Magnus – was already by then one of Moreland’s patrons, having commissioned him not long before to write the incidental music for a highbrow film which had Donners backing. Barnby, too, was beginning to sell his pictures to Sir Magnus at about that date. Barnby often talked about ‘the great industrialist’, who was, therefore, a familiar figure to me – at least in song and story – although I had myself only seen Sir Magnus twice: once at a party of Mrs Andriadis, which I had attended quite fortuitously; a second time, spending a week-end with the Walpole-Wilsons, when I had been taken over to Stourwater. Later on, one heard gossip about a
jolie laide
(in contrast with the ‘pretty girls’ Moreland had adumbrated at the Hay Loft) with whom Sir Magnus used occasionally to appear. She was called Matilda Wilson, said to be an actress. Sir Magnus and Matilda had parted company – at least were no longer seen together in public – by the time Moreland first met her. Afterwards, when Matilda became Moreland’s wife, I used sometimes to wonder whether Moreland himself ever recalled that Hay Loft conversation. If so, rather naturally, he never returned to the subject.

I think it would be true to say of Moreland that, up to a point, he did live with intensity. He worked hard at seasons, at others, concentrated whole-heartedly on amusing himself. This was within the limitations of the diffidence that enclosed him in dealings with women. There could be no doubt that Matilda herself had taken the decision that they should marry. Barnby used to say that women always take that decision. In any case, Matilda liked taking decisions. This taste of hers suited them both at the beginning of their married life, because Moreland was wholly without it, except where his own work was concerned.

‘The arts derive entirely from taking decisions,’ he used to say. ‘That is why they make such unspeakably burdensome demands on all who practise them. Having taken the decisions music requires, I want to be free of all others.’

Moreland’s childhood – since I have spoken at some length of childhood – had been a very different affair from my own. In the first place, music, rather than military matters, had been regarded as the normal preoccupation of those round him in the house of his aunt who brought him up. I mean music was looked upon there not only as an art, but also as the familiar means of earning a livelihood. In my own home, the arts, to some very considerable extent respected, were not at all regarded in that essentially matter-of-fact, no-nonsense, down-to-earth manner. When my father was attached to a cavalry regiment at Brighton before we moved to Stonehurst, my parents might attend an occasional concert at the Pavilion; meet Mr Deacon there, afterwards visit his flat. They would even be aware that Mr Deacon was a ‘bad’ painter. At the same time, painting, ‘good’ or ‘bad’ – like music, sculpture, writing and, of course, acting – would immutably remain for them an unusual, not wholly desirable, profession for an acquaintance. Indeed, a ‘good’ painter, certainly a well-known ‘modern’ painter (even though ‘modernism’ in the arts was by no means frowned upon by my father), would be considered even more of a freak than Mr Deacon himself, since being ‘well-known’ was, by its very nature, something of a social aberration. It was in Mr Deacon’s Brighton flat that he produced those huge pictures that might have been illustrations to Miss Orchard’s lessons about the gods of Olympus. Mr Deacon, in the words of his great hero, Walt Whitman, used to describe them as ‘the rhythmic myths of the Greeks, and the strong legends of the Romans’. The Furies were probably never represented by his brush, because Mr Deacon shunned what Dicky Umfraville used always to call ‘the female form divine’.

In the household of Moreland’s aunt, on the other hand, although there might be no money to spare – keeping solvent in itself rather a struggle – relatively celebrated persons flourished, so to speak, just round the corner. Moreland himself rather reluctantly agreed that some of the musicians who turned up there were ‘quite famous’, even if the writers and painters ‘showed an abysmal lack of talent’. ‘Modernism’ in the arts, if not much practised, was freely discussed. Life was seedy; it was also conducted on a plane in general more grown-up, certainly more easygoing, than existence at Stonehurst; for that matter at any of the other ever changing residences I had known as a child. For Moreland, the war had been no more than a mysterious, disturbing inconvenience in the background, the disagreeable cause to which indifferent or inadequate food was always attributed. It was not the sudden conversion into action of an idea already to a great extent familiar – even though the stupendous explosion of that idea, rendered into action, had never wholly ceased to ring in one’s ears. These were not the only dissimilarities of upbringing. From an early age, Moreland was looked upon by his aunt, and everyone else in their circle, as a boy destined to make a brilliant career in music. Even his childhood had been geared to that assumption. My own more modest ambition – not, as it happened, particularly encouraged by my parents – was to become a soldier. That obviously entailed a divergent manner of regarding oneself. In so far as we ever compared notes about our respective environments in early life, Moreland always maintained that mine sounded the stranger of the two.

‘Ours was, after all, a very bourgeois bohemianism,’ he used to say. ‘Attending the Chelsea Arts Ball in absolutely historically correct Renaissance costume was regarded as the height of dissipation by most of the artists we knew. Your own surroundings were far more bizarre.’

Perhaps he was right. What Moreland and I possessed unexpectedly in common, however, was on the whole more remarkable than these obvious contrasts. With only a month or two between our ages, some accumulation of shared experience was natural enough: the dog following Edward VII’s coffin, the Earls Court Exhibition, tents in Hyde Park for George V’s coronation – those all found a place. There were, however, in addition to these public spectacles, certain unaccountable products of the
Zeitgeist
belonging to both childhoods, contributing some particle to each personal myth, so abundant in their way that Moreland and I sometimes seemed to have known each other long before meeting for the first time one evening in the saloon bar of the Mortimer.

For example, in the face of energetic protest at the time, neither, on grounds that the theme was too horrific for the eyes of young persons, had been allowed to attend that primitive of cinematographic art, the film version of Dante’s
Inferno.
Later, less explicably, both had taken a passionate interest in the American Civil War and the Dreyfus Case, poring over pictures of those two very dissimilar historical events wherever their scenes and characters could be found illustrated. There were also aesthetic prejudices in common: animosity towards R. M. Ballantyne’s
The Coral Island,
capricious distaste for framed reproductions of Raphael’s
La Madonna della Sedia.

One of these altogether unwarrantable items in this eccentric scrapbook of faded mementoes that Moreland and I seemed to have pasted up together in the nursery (though Moreland always denied having had a nursery, certainly a nurse) was a precocious awareness of Dr Trelawney, for ‘the Doctor’ – as Moreland liked to call him – had never, in fact, suffered the fate, attributed to him by Mrs Gullick, of being shot in the Tower. Moreland’s Trelawney experiences had been acquired earlier than my own, though still young enough to experience the same uneasy thrill, alarming, yet enjoyable, at the thought of his menacing shadow.