Through Streets Broad and Narrow (9 page)

To the tramp he whispered, “Souvenir of nineteen sixteen.”

“What, sir?”

“Messines Ridge,” whispered Cloate, “Mademoiselle from Armentières left you the little present we're about to break down.” But the tramp only smiled humbly, and Groarke, who was reading the tattoos on the tramp's chest, said, “ ‘There shall be in this rich earth a richer dust concealed!' What happened to Florence? The girl you left behind you?”

But the tramp did not reply and Cloate told the sister, “He'll certainly vomit.”

When Groarke had got him under, Cloate manipulated the bougies skilfully and then inserted a self-retaining catheter. It was done very quickly and, coming round, the tramp began to heave. Greasy coins fell out of his trouser pockets and rolled across the floor.

Groarke said, “Pennies from heaven,” and Cloate snapped his eyes.

“The bucket, man!” he whispered to John, who went and got it just in time.

He left them after that and passed the remainder of the morning in Dr. Beale's skin clinic, standing well in the background because he was feeling depressed. At twelve o'clock he believed he had done enough and went off to meet Dymphna for lunch.

It was a different world he let himself into the following evening when he went round to Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch's rooms with his weekend case packed and the trousers of his best suit freshly creased.

Palgrave's room always embarrassed him a little; the chairs were too thin-legged, the curtains too deep and pink and Palgrave's habit of fluttering his too-fat hands in front of the fire, ostentatious.

But this was how his relationship with Palgrave was at that time, perpetually uneasy, frequently humiliating, often socially rewarding.

Palgrave Chamberlyn-Ffynch had been at Harrow, he was connected or related to several pages of names in Burke's Landed Gentry (of Ireland) and a column or two in Debrett. He belonged to the Ranelagh Club, the ultimate stronghold of the protestant ascendancy, had a flat in Half Moon Street, Mayfair, an estate in Offaly with a ruined castle, a sports car and, so he claimed, undescended testicles on both sides.

He was podgy from toe to tip, but made an elegance of it, by wearing double-breasted waistcoats, pomading his temples and gently powdering the top of his young bald head. He never
smoked anything but Melachrino or hand-rolled Balkan Sobranie, never drank anything but Bristol sherries and vintage wines and never, save where John was concerned, consented to know anyone intimately who was not what he termed
crême de la crême
.

His love life was to John quite extraordinary, since, like a woman, he was far more inclined to fall in love with identities rather than with persons. He would fall in or out of ineffectual love half-a-dozen times a year with Tatler photographs of the most hideous debutantes, with visiting American heiresses seen once at a party or with socially respectable film stars whom he had no chance whatsoever of meeting. He would trace the remoter connections of the peerage through Debrett and go to immense trouble to find out anyone who knew the family in which he was interested until he had pinned down its entire social ramifications. Then, in Horse Show Week, he would pursue the friend of a friend of his quarry and on finding that by this time she was married, engaged, or in India, start off on a completely new trail with undiminished ardour. In explanation he would say, “I'm only doing my best. In my position one simply cannot afford to get involved with just anyone. My father's always badgering me about it all. I can see his point as far as the place is concerned, of course, though since, in view of my trouble, we shall obviously have to adopt, I can't see quite what the hurry is.”

“Your father's probably lonely. What's he like, by the way?”

“He was in the Guards.”

“Oh.”

“He's really worried about the place, obviously. When he's dead I simply won't be able to carry it on unless I've managed to track down a girl with money. On the other hand we're both equally determined that she should be
right
. The servants and tenants would spot it in an instant if she weren't. They wouldn't stand it and I don't think I could either.”

“In what way?”

“In every way. I don't suppose you'll understand even when you've been down there, but I think you'll at least see that there is a difference. We've been there over a hundred years and that does something to a place.”

“Surely that's not very long?”

“You forget that we were landowners in France before the persecutions. We were Huguenot aristocracy, we inherited a tradition and we brought it with us to Offaly. It's there in the house, in the farms, in the whole place.”

Such conversations, any such examination of Palgrave's motives, nearly always concluded with this reference to “the place.” It lay in the back of his mind like a creed, like the ten commandments of the Israelites, informing all his waking days and dictating most of his actions.

On their journey down to it on that particular afternoon it grew grander and more fantastic with every mile, transmogrifying distances into glorious approaches. At Naas, a hundred miles away, they had to stop at Mrs. Herbert's, once a housekeeper to Palgrave's grandfather and now the proprietor of a café/restaurant patronized only by racing people and “the crême.” At Monasterevin, sixty miles away, they called on a bent gamekeeper in the local workhouse, and in Ballybunnian at ten miles distance they noted respectfully the grave of a dead butler whose name Palgrave was unable to remember.

“Shelagh, of course, is still alive,” he said. “One hopes you'll do nothing
outré.”

“Shelagh?”

“The housekeeper. You probably won't see her, as she doesn't come upstairs very much these days. But Shelagh is never wrong.”

“What sort of things mustn't I do?”

“Cigarettes, for example. Don't keep offering people your cigarettes.”

“Will there be other people there?”

“So far as I know, only my father and he doesn't smoke, actually. I purposely haven't invited anyone over this time. But you know what I mean?”

“That I should sort of hunt round for boxes in the hall and places?”

Palgrave sighed. “No, not
that
— Oh, never mind.”

“But how will Shelagh, the housekeeper, how will she know if she doesn't see me?”

“She always knows. And for God's sake don't notice the servants, they hate it.”

“Not say good morning, or anything?”

“No, no—”

“Just ignore them?”

“No, don't ignore them, but don't start talking to them. They don't like it. Do you know, by the way, how to eat cold snipe?”

“Cold snipe? I've never had it.”

“Oh, dear!”

“Are we likely to have it?”

“For breakfast.”

They drove in silence until Palgrave began to name the fields: the Partridge, the Long Oak, the Bog Paddock, the Woodcock. They passed the outer lodge and a steep castle. “Ruined. We use it as a granary and potato store.”

“About Shelagh,” said John, who was still worrying, “what on earth shall I do about tipping her? Or doesn't one?”

“Good God, no, just leave two pounds on your dressing table.”

“Two
pounds!”

“I'd like to be able to have you down again provided she approved.”

“But I've only got two pounds to last me till the end of the month. I thought ten shillings would be the most—”

“For underservants for the night that might be enough—but I can lend you it if you like.”

“Wouldn't a pound do?”

“You see,” Palgrave said, “you're not
known.”

John thought of Dymphna. The principal reason for coming in the first place had been to write her a letter from the Chamberlyn-Ffynch's address and substantiate it later by a little title-dropping. He wanted to collect what glory he could of the kind she would recognize and in this there was the difficulty of distinguishing one's own notions of the glorious from those of another whom one loved. But in Ireland she was a snob, conditioned into it by her people, by life on the shallow raft of names and acquaintances which floated precariously over the green bog of true Ireland.

They passed outer markers of the nearer demesne, a pair of
white stone spheres of great girth lying on the verges of the drive which here was weeded and roughly raked, the grass scythed and the great trees standing orderly.

There was a terrace and broad steps up to the white paint of the door set behind Corinthian columns. It was a long house, no wings thrown out, and, apart from the colonnaded portico, quite unpretentious.

They were admitted by a handyman butler. Really, as John later discovered, he lived in one of the cottages and logged the game, saw to the silage and the cows, but at call would move into the house, wait at table, carry logs, coal, ewers and live below stairs. His name was Murphy and he was probably a bad actor because John thought he discerned that in his eyes, which belonged to none of his callings.

In the hall there were more columns, green this time and square, fluted in two pairs with old regimental drums hanging from them with freshly blancoed webbing and buffskin tighteners. There was a club fender jutting out onto the grey stone flags in front of a quiet wood-fire and on this Chamberlyn-Ffynch's father was sitting with Captain Cavendish-Walker.

The father was as dapper as a bird, a rather dangerous little bird with black eyes slanting up like the ends of his small moustache to the Honey and Flowered grey hair. His shanks were sheated in fine wool stockings below narrow plus-fours, and his sleek jacket curved away over his hips like the sharp flight feathers of closed wings.

Cavendish-Walker, who was called Cac Wac for short, was nothing in particular. Just a big man with almost separate good health who knew how to laugh, eat, listen, talk, sleep, walk and shoot. John decided he could be ignored and only wondered what he was doing there and why he was womanless. This was perhaps an odd thought for him to think but he thought it nevertheless, perhaps because at sight the Captain reminded him of George Harkess that day of the murder so long ago with George talking about the Point to Point and covering up Enid's hand, her whole body, with the shadow of his own.

As it turned out Cac Wac was not without a companion. She came down the stairs a few minutes later, nearly in time for the
awkward introductions and for sherry. The introductions were difficult for Palgrave because he had not been expecting to find other guests, but for John they were a relief because he believed that any observation of his behavior would be less acute.

Claire Maunde was quite interesting, black lacquery hair and a smoker who smoked in a mannish way without being manly. She had grey eyes, or they might with additions have looked blue if she had worn the blue additions. There were a few lines in the soft skin of her oval face, a vertical above the bridge of the nose between fine eyebrows, very early crease marks beneath the eyes, and young brackets already enclosing the lips. She was gentle and withdrawn, not a Tatler person at all, he decided; and he also decided that she wrote. When he found out later that she did not, he still felt that she ought to because her conformity was so cleverly and yet so blatantly contrived and she read as she smoked, with absorption.

Nobody took very much notice of him, they seemed not to; but once or twice he caught the father's Huguenot eye upon him and thought he detected a great wariness, a damned disapproval which made his occasions of courtesy all the more disconcerting. For he was courteous at every necessary moment, ensuring that John was not left too long out of the conversation, seeing that he had cigarettes and a charged glass and sparing him a too direct: genealogical inquisition.

He asked only, “Anglesey?” and “Your father's a padre?” and commented, “Don't know Beowulf's School; Oxford, you say?” and left it at that. He also said, “Palgrave will show you your room,” and nodded curtly to his son.

In the morning they were going to shoot. Cac Wac had his own guns and they asked John what he used. He thanked God for the sixteen-bore in the study cupboard at home, the colour and assurance it lent to his reply in this world where shooting was so certainly not merely a way of life but the seasonal purpose of it.

“You've to be good,” said Cac Wac, “to knock down a jack-snipe with a sixteen.”

“Or a woodcock,” said the father.

“Even a snipe,” said Palgrave absurdly.

“You do a lot,” asked Cac Wac, “in Anglesey?”

“Mostly rabbits,” John was going to say, “for the dogs, and preferably sitting,” but instead he said, “Only rough, you know,” and saw that Claire Maunde was watching him with solicitude perhaps, or a detached amusement.

They went on talking about it until the dressing-bell rang. It was astonishing how much there was to say about the animals they were to shoot and the weapons with which they were going to shoot them. If he had known anything about it at all it would have been pleasant sitting there, letting the sherry, the magnificence of the drums, the fluted columns and flame-dressed walls enclose the world of banal and restrained anecdote. But, as it was, he knew that he was an intruder, a charlatan, and he knew not only that they all knew it too, but that the father resented it most particularly because of his fears for his son. It grew in John that Palgrave's friends were the only signs of a dangerous nonconformity which the father had to go on. He could blink the double-breasted waistcoats, the powdering of the head, the guitar-playing and even aspects of his son's time at Harrow and Oxford that may have been of some unease; but in the friends who came, in their sort, a secret may have been laid bare; the vesture of the soul he had been given as an heir. From the old man's scrutiny, wary but not wary enough, an idea was born in John's mind, an explanation of the hostility which dwarfed the columns and their drums, the winking hall, and made a cold spot in the warmth of the conversation.