The Pritchett Century (100 page)

So the amiable war hero and landowner, the girl’s father, reckless in the saddle, will have a heart attack in mysterious circumstances; he is a charming drinker and accepted pursuer of young girls when he goes to London. When he is dying his freezing wife is indifferent; her role is to conserve the “things” of the family—pictures, silver, fine inherited furniture, and the remains of the status and money. The role of the young girl is to control the war between wife, nurse, and the head-tossing servant who sneaks into the sickroom with fatal draughts of whiskey. She is the peasant with the pacifying art of giving sexual relief
under the sheets: she pretends she is warming the old man’s feet. What does the daughter crave? All the excitements of the freedom she has heard of in the Twenties: to be loved by the young man who has merely flirted in a gentlemanly way at a dance or two, and has vanished. She is red-faced, gauche, and clumsy in society, and has scarcely been educated by an ignorant governess hired mainly to teach her a few phrases of French as an item of gentility. What she craves is the assurance that her father is convinced of her virginity and that he loves
her
: he certainly hates his selfish wife. In the end he
does
show that he loves his daughter. He punishes his wife by leaving the girl the property. And the book ends with that great national festival, the classic Irish funeral at which the girl gets majestically drunk.

This book is an entertainment which in part recalls the one outstanding Irish novel of the nineteenth century,
The Real Charlotte
by E. O. Somerville and Martin Ross—the latter was the more sensitive and serious partner in the collaboration of Somerville and Ross in, for example,
Further Experiences of an Irish R.M
. Somerville was the mistress of country house farce and its metaphors (“Birds burst out of holly bushes like corks out of soda water bottles.” We remember old Flurry Knox whose “grandmother’s curry” was so powerful that “you’d take a splint off a horse with it.”) Ross was the subtler social moralist who could almost match Mrs Gaskell’s
Wives and Daughters
or, on native grounds, Maria Edgeworth.

Molly Keane’s real novel, substantial and ingeniously organised, is the more recent
Time After Time
. It is more Ross than Somerville in temper than the earlier book. Now good behaviour is in abeyance, although its shadow is there. We are now in a period closer to the present day. Still no politics, though there is a horrified glance at a political crime abroad, the Holocaust.

For the rest, the Irish imbroglio tells its own tale. Elderly Jasper Swift and his three sisters look back on past glories as they quarrel in the Big House while its remaining acres have become a wilderness. The family are all old, the youngest in her sixties, the others in their late seventies. There are no comic servants, there is little money. Jasper, once at Eton, paces about in the patched clothes of his dressy youth: he has been left the terrible legacy of looking after his bickering
and pitiless sisters. His realm is in the kitchen. He does the cooking, specialising in dubious menus with strange sauces which he recalls from his gourmet past; some of the stuff has been rescued from the dogs and cats and is made anonymous by a last-minute scattering of herbs. He is a quiet, nervy fellow and doesn’t bother now to conceal his faintly homosexual past; a sort of half-fey cunning saint whose main relief—apart from cooking—is ruling his sisters by getting his own back. They are tough, high-spirited, unsexed ladies but bottled in illusions about their youth. In a confusing narrative which ingeniously brings back glimpses of the family past—and without any clumsy use of flashback so that the past secretes itself in fragments—we are grateful that the ladies are conveniently called April, May, and June.

Fiercely they lock their bedrooms against one another. They have all, including Jasper, been emotionally maimed by the monstrous, possessive will of their “darling Mummie,” long ago dead. We are back in a forgotten Anglo-Irish, perhaps totally Irish, puzzle: how do the women survive? The answer is by secretiveness, rancour; liberated by isolation, they go “underground” and “make do,” all expert in the “home truth.”

Shut up in her room, seventy-five-year-old April, the ex-beauty, lives among the beautiful dresses of her past. She is a childless widow—she knows what the others don’t, that “thing men do.” (Her husband, a pornographer, liked “doing it” on trains.) She lives in the past, and is deaf and carries a pad on which the others have to write down what they have to say. Her chief occupations are weight-watching and push-ups. Her deafness seems to enhance what was once beauty: she is “armoured for loneliness.” She sips vodka and is bemused by tranquillisers.

May’s room is as bleak as a room in a nursing-home. She looks and lives like a robot, has never been desired, but is frantically busy as a bad artist. She makes pictures out of tweed, grasses, dead flowers, and leather. She loves to collect china rabbits—her obsession. She is also light-fingered where bright little objects are concerned: tinsel, marbles, anything that shines—a jackdaw. Her dexterity with her hands is astonishing for she was born with a “cropped right hand with only two fingers.” She knows how to conceal this wound at local talks on flower
arrangement. She is in conspiracy also with the local antique dealer—a new type in modern Ireland—and is not above some skilful stealing.

Baby June, the youngest, aged sixty-four, has reverted to the peasant condition and is indeed a by-blow. Fit to do the work of two men, illiterate, she is a powerful girl in the stables and has been, in her time, a rider who was the terror of every point-to-point in the country and was “the shape and weight of a retired flat race jockey.” She is an expert at delivering calves, killing lambs, knows how to deal with farrowing pigs. She clumps into the house, satisfied by the blood on her hands and clothes. Her closest friend and pupil is a pious Catholic stable-lad she is training to become a jockey. Around the sisters crowd their lascivious dogs and cats in Jasper’s filthy kitchen. (
His
cat sits on the bread board.)

And then, a pitiless figure descends on them—old indeed, fat but in gorgeous clothes, reeking of Paris and insinuation. She is Leda, half-Jewish, the daughter of a famous restaurateur in Vienna who had married into the family before the 1940 war. To her cousins she brings back the childhood memories of past wealth and pleasure. Miraculously they feel rejuvenated. They had never liked to talk about her because of her Jewish blood, for they were sure she had been trapped by the Nazis and had died in Belsen. They half-remember that, when staying with them as a girl, she had been suddenly, without explanation, and in one of the high moments of “good behaviour”—“so sorry you cannot stay”—firmly sent off at a moment’s notice by “darling Mummie,” a genius of the final goodbye. Perhaps it was something to do with Daddy or Jasper? It doesn’t matter now: they are ravished by her miraculous chatter. They are overcome by pity for her state: she is blind. Only Baby June, illiterate, dirty, has no time for her. Jasper himself, the man who had always longed to be “more of a Human Being,” is excited. He returns to compete with Vienna in his kitchen. Leda, in short, brings the family to life. They put her in Mummie’s sacred room and thenceforth she worms their secrets out of them. It is a seduction with a special compensation: her blindness. She cannot see how aged they all are, any more than she can know her own ugliness.

But when we see Leda installed alone in Mummie’s sacred room we watch her do a strange thing. She gropes towards the wardrobe where
Mummie’s beautiful dresses still hang and, fingering the material, pulls the finest one out and spits all over it. Leda, we see, is here for vengeance. (Here is the real echo of the appalling jealousy Martin Ross evoked in
The Real Charlotte
.) One by one she worms out the eager secrets: April, full of erotic notions, picked up from her dead husband the pornographer; May the artist and nimble shoplifter; guilty Baby June who once shot Jasper in the eye when she was a child of seven; and Jasper, with his peculiar meetings with a local monk. At a terrible breakfast scene she comes out with all of it. Jasper in his lazy, evasive, semi-saintly way gladly makes himself out to be worse than the sisters who drive him mad, in order not to look nicer than they are.

There is more to this thoroughly well-organised traditional study of intrigue, malice, and roguery. It is rich and remarkable for the intertwining of portraits and events. It is spirited, without tears. The ingenious narrative is always on the move and has that extraordinary sinuous, athletic animation that one finds in Anglo-Irish prose. Mrs Keane has a delicate sense of landscape; she is robust about sinful human nature and the intrigues of the heart, a moralist well weathered in the realism and the evasions of Irish life. No Celtic twilight here! Detached as her comedy is, it is also deeply sympathetic and admiring of the stoicism, the
incurable
quality of her people. When Leda herself is exposed and is taken off and put back with her nuns again, a helpless, cynical, evil creature, April relentlessly goes with her, almost like a wardress, to make her do her slimming exercises. Jasper, who has never quite been able to become a “human being,” has one less sister to torment and turns once more to his cooking and gardening. So Irish realism, with the solace of its intrigues, dominates this very imaginative and laughing study of the anger that lies at the heart of the isolated and the old, and their will to live.

(1990)

John Osborne has always been a master of spoken diatribe, whether it is of the “bloody but unbowed” kind or the picturesque confessional of wounds given and received. In his vigorous autobiography
A Better Class of Person
he has the wound-licking grin of the only child who has been through the class mill and is getting his own back—very much a comic Mr Polly or a Kipps reborn in 1929, if less sunny and innocent than Wells was. Osborne adds to the rich tradition of English low comedy, which draws on the snobberies and vulgarities of lower-middle-class life, with its guts, its profligate will to survive despite its maudlin or self-pitying streak. He calls his people Edwardian, for manners drag on long after their presumed historical death; really his family were on the bohemian verges. Both the Welsh and the Cockney sides—the latter known in the family folklore as “the Tottenham Crowd,” with some sniffing of the nose—had a racy leaning towards pubs, music halls, and theatre. (All, except his sad father, lived to a tremendous age.) His two grandfathers were well-established if secretive rakes; one was the manager of a once famous London pub in the theatre district and had an early-morning spat with the lavishly seductive Marie Lloyd. Osborne’s
Welsh father was a self-taught pianist who could sing a song. He earned his living as an advertising copywriter of sorts until his health collapsed. He first met Nellie Beatrice Grove, who was to be the playwright’s mother, when she was a barmaid in the Strand. She had left school at twelve to scrub floors in an orphanage, had quickly bettered herself as a cashier in a Lyons Corner House, and eventually went on to the bar of a suburban hotel. She resented her sister Queenie putting on airs because she had, by some family accident, been “educated” and worked in a milliner’s. (The class struggle has its nuances.) If one uncle was a stoker in the Navy, another had an admired connection with Abdulla cigarettes. Was he a director? Goodness knows, but he smoked the expensive things all day. Bids for gentility were natural in a family that, on both sides, took some pride in having “come down in the world.” Osborne writes:

The last was a characteristic piece of poetic fancy by which the Londoner draws on local history. The words meant that someone was relating the young Osborne to times before his own; he was “clumsy.” The elephant evoked a popular large bun sold at a cheap and now extinct eating-house in the Strand. I believe the American equivalent would be Child’s.

Osborne was an only child, and for long years he was too sickly to be sent to school. No adult spoke to him much, so he listened, puzzling his way through the family babble. Religion was remote. Comfort in
the discomfort of others, he remarks, was the abiding family recreation. “Disappointment,” Osborne adds, “was oxygen to them.” The Family Row at Christmas was an institution, the Groves shouting, the Osbornes calmer and more bitter in their sense of having been cheated at birth. Nellie Beatrice, the barmaid mother, mangled the language with her Tottenham mispronunciations—very upsetting to the precise and eloquent Welsh. As she complained, they “passed looks” when she spoke. Her genius shone at the bar:

She was known as Bobby, and was noted for shouting out her wartime catch phrases: “Get up them stairs”; “The second thing he did when he come home was to take his pack off”; or “I couldn’t laugh if I was crafty.” At home, her energies were restless. She was a relentless cleaner, whether she lived in digs in dreary Fulham or in a snobby suburb, and never stopped stripping and cleaning the few rooms they lived in, taking up all the carpets and taking down all curtains once a week. She loved moving house. Meals, such as they were, were made to be washed up rather than to be eaten. She was a mistress of the black look. She was hungry for glamour, not for bringing up children, and certainly not a sickly boy who caught every illness going. Her ideal—after the father died and the war filled her purse with wartime tips—was to “go Up West,” walk round the big London stores without buying anything, complaining of her feet, and have a lunch at the gaudy Trocadero, where she could look suitably stand-offish. She was deeply respectable. This is the half-cruel portrait by her son, who was to become a “better class of person.” He confesses to a struggle against a shame of her: