Through Streets Broad and Narrow (11 page)

Palgrave said, “You made such as ass of yourself this morning.”

John ignored this and asked, “Is she your grandmother?”

“Great. She's a hundred and two. Please be quick and quiet; if Shelagh finds out we've been in to see her she'll be extremely annoyed.”

They came to a green baize door on which patterns were studded with brass-headed nails. Beyond it there was another door of heavy waxed oak and through this a small tiled vestibule scented with chrysanthemums. Palgrave opened a third, white-painted door and disclosed a long room with a moulded ceiling.

It was was strewn with small tables and fern stands carrying silver-framed photographs and ceramics, miniatures, powder boxes and paperweights; there were showcases full of ivory figurines, golden teaspoons and collections of Empire fans, their lattices strung with feathers, paste and semi-precious stones; there were museum-type display cabinets full of medals, stars, orders, Greek and Roman coins, and Anglo-Saxon jewellery. On the walls were ranged glass walking-sticks like barley sugar and icicles, some of them with coloured glass spiralling and flowering in their centres. Family portraits and coats of arms hung surrounded by festoons of African weapons and ostrich-plumed fans. Wherever there was space there were bookcases filled with slender bindings and limited editions. There were marquetry cabinets, a score of Victorian and Edwardian watercolours with gilt frames of mansions and manors, Italian villas and butterfly-rigged sailings ships and boats.

At the far end there was a dull turf fire, sweetening the labyrinthine air and a scrap screen with Queen Victoria bonneted
and bunned in one of the panels and Prince Edward with Princess Alexandra in another.

They went quickly down the long room, circling the many tables and stands, and Palgrave said, “You can look round the screen.”

“What shall I say?”

“She's stone deaf and practically blind, but I want you to see her.”

“But she may not like being looked at.”

“My great-grandmother's the most aristocratic woman in Ireland. She was an intimate friend of Queen Alexandra's and a mistress of Edward the Seventh. She may die at any moment.”

John humoured him. He also humoured himself: he wanted to see the owner of the room which lay round them like the spoils of an empire. He stood up on a Victorian footstool prickled with greeny-purple vine leaves, their edges frosted with white beads, and leaned over the top of the screen. Below him, her rusty dress fluffed out sickly as a bird's plumage, the old lady nested in her wing chair. Her eyes, beneath stretched brows, were foggy with cataract and her nose, like a dead person's, was as inanimate as thin yellow wax stayed upon an armature, a modeller's “rough.”

He saw the old and beautiful silk of her gown, a ruby thread in the black warp so that it glowed as a charcoal fire glows through its blackness. He saw the rings sliding like dolls' bangles up the wasted fingers of the upraised right hand as she picked and twirled ceaselessly with first one then another sharp nail at her nostrils.

He tried to see her dancing, receiving ambassadorial guests in distant legations; he tried to fill in the yellow hollows of the cheeks and see the eyes, once black as her grandson's, old Chamberlyn-Ffynch, sliding away over a fan in some exquisite calculation; but all he could see were the materials housed in the smoky dress and the gesture of boredom of an old child waiting for someone to come or for something to happen.

“Well?” said Palgrave. “What's she doing?”

To avoid a betrayal, John replied, “She isn't doing anything.”

“Let me see.”

“You can look round the edge, can't you?”

“If she saw me I'd have to introduce you.”

“But I'd like to be introduced.”

“It would upset Shelagh.”

John got down and Palgrave glanced over the screen. He looked disgusted and hurried out of the room immediately. He said, “I thought we might go over to tea with Grania de Savigny.”

“Who's she?”

“Her father's the Marquis de Savigny. It's one of those Roman Catholic titles; very old, though.”

“The Marquis de Savigny,” John said, “Marquis de—, Marquis de—! How fascinating! What's Grania like?”

“I wish to God you had some other clothes,” said Palgrave.

“So do I; but what's she like?”

“That's what she's like, she'll simply loathe that suit: it shows your behind.”

“I don't want to see any bloody little stuck-up Catholic snobs,” John retorted, “unless they're extremely pretty.”

“If you had a good big pullover—I'll see if I can borrow one from Cac Wac. It couldn't look worse than that suit.”

“How old is she?”

“Nineteen.”

“Blonde or brunette?”

“She has fair hair.”

“Blonde then,” said John.

“One doesn't use the word. It sounds like a servants' magazine.”

They were on the way to the stables where the cars were garaged.

“I don't think I'll come,” John said, “you're so arrogant.”

Palgrave said, “You'll just have to learn. If only you knew how irritating it is for me when you're always getting things just slightly wrong.”

“In that case, why did you bring me?”

“Because,” said Palgrave, “if you want to know, you're so damn sweet.”

He was smiling, there was impatient wit in his face. A rolypoly;
a fat young boy or girl, even a debutante not yet fined down. John was able to switch his own sex in that instant with all the ease that had been denied him in wanting to restore youth to Lady Eleanora Chamberlyn-Ffynch. He knew even that it was good to be loved by this ugly little creature, her great-grandson. He was in an instant delighted by looking into and conquering the black eyes of the father in the face of the son. Then, as a lightning strike first illumines and as immediately blackens a tree, he was shivered over with a fire of disgust so secret and shameful that its experience must scarcely be acknowledged even to himself. He felt himself blushing and, as he did so, thought, I am become a lover; he will interpret my colour as complicity, God help him.

They borrowed an outsize hacking jersey from Cac Wac which John wore with his tweed trousers. It made him feel slender and frail. Within a few minutes of putting it on he wanted to take it off again because of this effect, because of being driven about by Palgrave as though he were a woman. At first he tried to invent excuses for turning back, for showing his independence; to insist on walking, perhaps? But whatever conduct he settled upon, it would only be interpreted as gaucherie or temperament. Palgrave would say to himself, “He's being difficult,” or perhaps he might say,
“She's
being difficult.”

As they went down white roads across the bogs and marshes, circled the great estate wall of the Marquis de Savigny, John smoked one of his own cigarettes while Palgrave sat there smiling to himself as contentedly as a lover declared. There was no means of expunging that smile. To say, “What d'you mean, I'm so damned sweet?” would be as indelicate as saying to Lady Eleanora Chamberlyn-Ffynch, “Stop picking your nose,” when one was not even supposed to be in her presence.

These people did not conversationally acknowledge a number of things: indigestion, poverty, sickness, senility, religion, drunkenness or adultery. They certainly would not acknowledge pederasty; they would send it to Australia. So how could he say anything so direct to Palgrave as “I'm not that sort of a boy,” and he added to himself—“or girl.”

How shaming. How disgusting. Why, even in the saying of
it he would be confirming a possibility. His whole mistake had been in going about with Palgrave in the first place and that had only been in order to impress Dymphna.

It occurred to him then that she might feel about him as he himself felt about Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch. That simply by seeking her out and desiring her he was forcing something utterly ugly and distasteful upon her from which there was no escape so long as she consorted with him, and that she too might be doing this only in order to impress her parents or friends.

He thought, When this weekend is over I shall never see Chamberlyn-Ffynch again. In the meantime I shall keep my distance and be silent. I'll go hell for leather for this de Savigny girl however haughty and ugly she is.

She came down the steps to meet them in jodhpurs and a yellow pullover. She certainly wasn't exciting to see. A boyish face, almost a comedian's, with a fat red little nose and greedy lips, round blue eyes full of fresh air; a dumpy figure.

“Palgrave!” she said. “Thank God you've come, I'm so deadly bored.”

She stiffened at the introduction and looked John up and down very quickly with her full and silly blue eyes, as blue as the red cheeks were red.

“He's just staying till tomorrow,” Palgrave said, “I was so bored myself I couldn't face another Sunday at Trinity on my own with all those awful Arts students—”

“I can't think why ever you went there.”

“It's my father; he's got an idea we're all finished. We've lost so much on the estate in the last ten years that he insists on my having a degree in case I ever have to work for my living.”

The house was very large, so great that John could never quite remember it afterwards. It was of stone, there were vast pillars, softly fluted, morticed Stonehengian horizontals held up over their heads and rows of Georgian glassed windows thinly distorting the reflections of sky and trees, of shadows and columns. The door mat beneath the centre of the portico was as large as a carpet and beside it there were bristling hedgehog machines for the cleaning of boots.

The site was the level top of a nearly round hill, the land
falling away beyond the limits of the shingled drive into terraced gardens and a ha-ha beyond which there were rough fields and deciduous woods clothing the near slope of the surrounding valley.

Still talking, they went down to the first terrace where a rococo fountain dripped and dribbled over mossy fish, stone anchors and windings of fishermen's net. The water in the basin was green-black, large golden carp were submerged in its murk, their scales dimmed by sediment and disease. The unshaved box hedges of the formal gardens stretching away to right and left enclosed geometrical beds which were growing weeds among the dwarf cacti and perennials.

The girl said, “We could go and have a drink at one of the pubs. There's never anything in the house.”

Peasant-fashion, she was scratching at her back with a switch she had pulled in passing and she was walking closely with Palgrave as though they understood one another; either to titillate John, so he thought, or else because she hadn't liked the look of him. She was about the same height as Palgrave and nearly as ugly if one allowed for the fact that she was a girl. John wondered what were the proper motions of gallantry when it was not felt; it was difficult enough when it was genuine but he was no good at the acted lie. He was very conscious of the house rising behind them with its tall windows and sea-green cupola, the dockyard scale of its architecture and equipment. It was the only possible aspect of the girl which could attract him; the imagining of her growing up in all this careless space, carelessly. “And
I
am here!” he said to himself. “I am walking with a Marquis' daughter through terraced gardens!”

He was turning back towards the car when Palgrave asked him where he was going.

“I thought we were going to have a drink in a pub.”

Then the de Savigny girl laughed and Palgrave smiled with her.

“God!” he said. “He does this sort of thing all the time. Surely you don't imagine we have to drive?”

“It's one of Daddy's pubs,” said Grania. “We have two villages on the estate and three pubs. We're going to the nearest one just beyond the folly. Tim O'Hagan's.”

When they got there, it was a cottage with a counter on which stood a barrel of Guinness. John said, “I don't call this a pub.”

“It's probably not what you're used to,” she said.

“Road houses,” Palgrave added with fatigue.

The cottager, O'Hagan, served them with deference but a disinterest similar to that of Murphy, so that John wondered if all the country Irish had this air of acting out their relationship with their masters.

They drank at first two pints of Guinness each, then John insisted on a third and persuaded the others to join him. He wanted to drink up the house, all its darkness, tipping down into himself the cold brown murk of the pool, the slow golden carp and the wet woods of oak and elm. The Guinness seemed to him to be a distillation of these things, the drink which would spring naturally from the ground if it were broached; tasting of good earth and bitterness, of deep timbered roots, and supporting on its brim a thick sweet foam.

They went back to the house the long way round and came to a shrine in the woods. It was a beech tree beside a leaf-sodden path, to the bole of which a blue statue of the Madonna had been fixed at eye level. On a little tray at the foot of the pedestal children had arranged flowers in empty potted-meat jars. The flowers had withered and mildewed in the wet and there was orange-coloured lichen sprouting in the eye sockets and from the folds of the blue mantle of the Virgin.

Grania and Palgrave went straight past it but John stopped because of the intense surprise it caused him. Though so innocent it seemed to be in such very bad taste and its neglect deprived it even of pathos. When he caught the others up he asked, “Why do you have a statue there?”

“Daddy's villagers are always putting them up,” she said.
“We
don't mind; do you?”

“But why?”

“Isn't he dreary?” she said to Palgrave. “Because one of them probably saw a vision there or got her rheumatism cured when she was getting firewood from the tree, or poaching.”