Brother Death Page 9

  “I’d no idea women could be so sadistic,” he said.

  “Then you’ve a remarkably poor knowledge of the human mind, my friend.”

  Expelled for indolence (she had never been able to learn to crochet, and could, in fact, do nothing with her hands) she had fallen readily into the role of idle, as opposed to her younger sister’s industrious, apprentice. Months of semi-imprisonment followed, in which the discovery of Shelley was made:

  “Human pride

  Is skilful to invent most serious names

  To hide its ignorance.”

  “But was she so very terrible, your grandmother?” he enquired.

  “Not fundamentally, I believe, but born into that narrow world, she had made no effort to break her bonds and saw to it as a point of honour that others should be similarly bound. Her own husband had died young. There was some mystery about that which I have never clarified: they say that he committed suicide. Be that as it may, she lived on for fifty-seven years without a man. You can see what that meant: it meant the Bible and . . . oh! . . . her sago puddings, you should have seen them. The funny thing is that when we went abroad, as we sometimes did—on my mother’s money, of course—granny showed quite excellent taste. She had a passion for opera, which meant Milan and Salzburg. In those places she positively glowed. She had admirers, but at home she was mean: the kind who think that all servants steal and write the word ‘slut’ in the dust of the drawing-room mantelpiece.”

  “I suppose your mother took you away from all that eventually?”

  “Yes, she did. For some reason she always liked me best, but of course another motive was to spite my grandmother, who detested her. My sister was always worthy and girl-guidy: you know: knots, lanyards, little whistles and black stockings. At bottom, I don’t think my mother could have cared less, but I suppose she thought she might as well save one of us for hell-fire. She chose me, and took me with her to Australia. I was then sixteen.”

  “And Australia?”

  “Hip-flasks and high tea, and meat . . . meat . . . meat. Mother sent me to a finishing school near Melbourne. The educational standard was about the level of a British elementary school. The one idea of every girl was to go as far as she could with a boy in the back seat of a car without actually allowing him to give her the works. The worst aspects of America, with a touch of Leeds thrown in.”

  “Yet Australians fight well,” he demurred.

  “That doesn’t surprise me: they have no other cultural resources.”

  “And your mother’s second husband?”

  “A cipher, with occasional appearances in the bankruptcy court. In the end, she pensioned him off. Later, he died of cancer.”

  “You have a charming family.”

  “N’est-ce pas? But look carefully into anyone else’s, and you’ll see the maggots wriggling.”

  “And your mother? She must have had a lot of money?”

  “Oh, it grew and grew as sheep were sheared. Mind you, she’d never done a hand’s turn herself; a blackhearted brother had made the pile. Mother’s part was to supervise his home life, to prevent him marrying. She succeeded, all right.”

  That year (it must have been about ’31, though concerning dates she was vague) the mother, an inveterate globe-trotter (what can have spurred her on from palm to palm, and one Hotel Bristol to another?) had made a trip through Tahiti to Hawaii and Los Angeles. Returning, with baggage multi-coloured, she had issued her edict to the girl:

  “You are wasting your time here. You shall go to Lausanne and be finished properly. I shall join you in six months.”

  Oh, the arrogance, the bestiality of the very rich: the imperious telephone calls to Cook’s, the ten-franc, the ten-peseta, the twenty-zloty notes flung unheeding to doormen with dirty collars and seven children. Yet it needs a Calvinistic mind, indeed, to disapprove the pleasure which was hers upon arrival in Switzerland.

  “On the voyage I had my first affair. He was an engineer cadet. No stripes . . . just a patch upon his collar. He took me to the sick bay . . . what a climb! I couldn’t do it now. It wasn’t very successful, really. The ship was rolling.”

  At Lausanne she discovered Life. Until that moment, as she now perceived, she had not truly breathed. She took philosophy, her natural bent: first Kant and Hegel, venerables perhaps too quickly discarded, then Heidegger and the elusive Kierkegaard. In her hours of ease she met a pianist in the street. One wink was sufficient. He took her to an hôtel meublé, and completed the work begun by the engineer cadet.

  But mother was once again upon the way:

  “You are dissipating your youth here. Go back to Scotland and get married. You shall have five pounds a week from me for life; no less, and not one penny more.” She had forgotten the malaria which, neglected, was to kill her within the next ten years.

  Ah, if disappointed age could but understand, if youth could but explain.

  Peterhead once more: the younger sister, unrecognisable now, Leader of the Brownies, pen friend of the pastor. Strong disapproval from the grandmother, but as compensation, conferences over cups of cocoa with the aunt, late at night, amid the antimacassars. She, too, had once skirted wedlock, and it was with twenty pounds from her savings plus two pounds from the maid’s that the girl took the night train from Edinburgh to Bloomsbury.

  “Excuse me,” interrupted Rumbold, “but your acquaintances are yearning to sit down.”

  This was true. Fatigued by endless rumbas, the man Juan and the girl Inez had been circulating for some minutes near the table, their eyes beseeching, but the politeness of their race a bar to sitting down again unless invited. Of Mariano there was no sign.

  “Let them sit at the next table,” she said. “Juan,” she called. “Drink the rest of this bottle and don’t disturb us. We are busy. Unless,” she said, turning to Rumbold who was laughing, “unless, of course, I am boring you?”

  “Not in the least. I was only laughing at your feudal manner.”

  “It is the best way with ponces,” she said drily. “Shall I continue?”

  “Do! I enjoy a good autobiographical sketch. It reminds me of the Russian novels. Do you know what I mean . . . And so they told each other the story of Their Lives.”

  “The Russians come in at the right moment,” she continued. “For it was on that first trip to the Great Metropolis that I discovered them.”

  “You were living where?” he said.

  “Oh, in Earl’s Court, of course, at first, until I discovered that chintz surroundings and two pieces of toast for breakfast make rather a big hole in tiny incomes! Then I moved to Camden Town: sordid, you know, but near the Zoo.”

  “And your game preserves?”

  “Well . . . Charlotte Street, you know, and Zwemmers. A curious mixture, I suppose, of Bertorellis and ice skating rinks, of the Great Pretentious and the Great Untutored.”

  “You married, I suppose, about that time?”

  “How did you guess?”

  “Because the story is not new. What was he like?”

  “Oh, good school, bone-idle; a mother’s boy whose mother died before the completion of her work. For a living he played poker. When things got bad he sold a car or two. He was clever with his fingers, and made discs which he put into cigarette machines, so that smoking cost him nothing. It was a shot-gun wedding. His father sent five pounds, my mother ten. I remember we had a drink at Bailey’s.”

  “And the child?”

  “A boy. I loathed it from the first. Fortunately, we had an Irish girl called Eileen. ‘Tay’ she taught it to say . . . ‘Tay’. The child nearly drove me mad with it, and it wasn’t till months later that I learned that he meant ‘Tea’. When Denis and I split up, he was adopted.”

  “And where is your husband now?”

  “Where do you think? In Kenya,
learning about sisal and knocking the ‘niggers’ about. In the war he became a major, I believe, but I don’t think he ever heard a shot fired. Very few of these professional patriots ever do.”

  “You were then twenty.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was twenty. But now I’m thirty-two.”

  Twenty! Rumbold calculated. That meant 1934: a bad year; one in which the great slump was nearly over, but one in which the Hitlerian decade had also just begun. What a difference, he reflected, between those who were thirty to-day, and their juniors by ten years. What a difference, also, between those who were thirty and those who, twenty-five now, had sprung from the Latin primer to the Bren gun.

  These thoughts, which Rumbold attributed to the influence of champagne, he put from him as others might a leper. His mind blank once more, he listened to the unfolding of her tale.

  The marriage at an end, all contact with the family in Scotland had been severed. The aunt was ill, the grandmother was dying of some bowel disease; each weekly attack more serious than the last. Soon the vast gas-lit house, with its cargo of horrific but often priceless Victoriana, would pass to the priggish, but, it seemed, warm-hearted sister.

  “She often lent me money. Here is her photograph. Do you notice any point in common?”

  “She has more chin than you,” he said. “A better brow. The eyes are her defect: too small.”

  And he wondered at the voyage or two, the infrequently expressed preference of a wilful mother that could transform persons of the same blood: one into the performer of good works, the other to a feather for each wind that blew.

  Just enough money to stave off with an occasional good meal the pernicious anæmia threatened by late nights, not enough to smoke, as she wished to do incessantly; not enough to buy the clothes which would have enabled her to use the writing paper in the Berkeley. Two sides to this personality: one serious, réflechie, the relic of Lausanne, the student of philosophy; the second flighty, irresponsible, determined to enjoy each venial and some mortal sins before her ankles thickened and the first creases should appear upon her neck:

  “But I was never much good with men,” she said. “For it was not money that I wanted, but affection. Conversation, polite usage, the subtleties of erotic etiquette . . . all these defeated me. I had a girl-friend. We lived together. With business men from Bradford she could talk of worsted cloth; with Poonas home from India, of polo. Yet she knew nothing of these subjects: it is a talent, I suppose.”

  Values! One must have some, however tawdry, even if they be represented by the dictum that the first ten thousand is the hardest one to make. She had no values, and could not play bridge. Among her own class, still comfortable in the flourishing Chamberlain era, she was an outcast. With what she naïvely termed the “Lower Orders” she felt uncomfortable and guilty, suffering no doubt from that scrupulous malady of which the Jesuits complain. Artists, real artists of course, urged her to work: the counterfeit variety borrowed sixpences from her for half-pints of bitter.

  By 1938 she was in Paris with an American photographer. This must have been the period of her greatest beauty. The photographer gave her the chance of work as mannequin to a Grande Couturière. She refused; not from sloth, but from lack of confidence:

  “Clothes I loved indeed,” she said, “but somehow could never wear them. Could never summon the energy to sit for an hour before a mirror, making slight alterations to my face. My style was the politely tatty, not the mink.”

  “Yet you seem feminine enough,” he said.

  “Too much so.”

  And now he divined the conflict, the long shadows of the Sunday School and John Knox, denied indeed, but still powerful.

  “I suppose the next step was the Great Love,” he said coarsely, pleased with his own perspicacity, and yet ashamed of it.

  “Yes,” she said. “It was. Nor do I regret it. You know St. Tropez. Several of us had gone down there. I met a fisherman. . . .”

  “You don’t surprise me. The confraternity exists to pleasure English ladies on the loose.”

  “Not this one. He knew I had no money. My friends went back to Paris, but I stayed on. I stayed, in all, for nearly twenty months.”

  Puritan to Puritan, birds of the same plumage cleave together. He stopped her from smoking (later an attack of whooping cough removed the craving altogether). He cut down her drinking to three or four apéritifs each day. At night they would go out in his boat, catching lobster, red mullet and the ingredients of some rich man’s bouillabaisse . . . round the Cap Camaret to Cavalaire and Le Lavandou; lovely names and the surrounding pinewoods as lovely. It was upon the discarded foliage of those pines, brown, resilient, that they had made their mattress.

  “Was he, then, so very handsome?” he enquired.

  “Yes . . . in that peculiar, hawk-like Italian way. Naples has added something to the Southern French. I did not know, then, that he was a coward. . . .”

  “And with you, of course, that mattered?” he said, with calculated irony.

  “When the war came he was mobilised. This made him suffer from a Crise de Conscience. For the first time for many months he thought of his wife, his two curly-headed children. He abjured me. . . .”

  “I like that word,” said Rumbold. “It is most suitably ecclesiastic. And you, I suppose, were suitably annoyed?”

  “Oh yes, but not in the way that you imagine. I made friends with his wife. I confessed all (hitherto she had worn her horns in ignorance). We presented a united front on the lines of the Lysistrata. You can imagine the effect of that upon a small-time tyrant. He went to confession five times in as many days. He hit me once or twice but I can kick. There is a devil in me somewhere.”

  The Neapolitan had not collected very much from the brief French war, except a benign form of phthisis, and, in consequence, a pension. Meanwhile she had fled.

  “To Iviza, in the Balearics. I spent the six years of the deluge there.”

  “You did not think of return to England . . . the Ats, the Waffs, the various forms of slave labour in khaki?”

  “Oh, the Consul was prodigal with advice, and even warnings, to be sure: ‘Mrs. Lampeter, do you not wish to serve your country?’ . . . ‘No,’ I replied. ‘My country will always avoid its just retribution somehow.’ Also, of course, my mother, nursing to the last in confirmation of her 1914-18 form, had joined me promptly at the fall of France, and just as promptly died. Her will made of me an heiress; my sister received nothing except some Paraguayan railway funds. But there was a catch: a typically maternal one. When the son whom I renounced is twenty-one, he inherits, and I am left without a penny.”

  “How did she die?” he said.

  “Well, she had lately become a Spiritualist (‘I see something behind your chair’, she would say to me in a restaurant). She also claimed to be in telepathic communication with Mary, Queen of Scots. She must have renewed her subscription to Psychic News just before she died: anyway, I received it for a whole year afterwards. She died at lunch, literally between two mouthfuls. I had never seen a dead person before.”

  “And you were sorry?”

  “What do you expect . . . the conventional parade of grief? She had never meant anything to me, nor I to her. The most that I can say in her favour is that she never tried to bully me. Like most of these cranks she was a fatalist. ‘You will come to a bad end,’ she used to tell me, ‘it is in your palm. Nothing that I can do will save you.’ Poor mother! So much energy, and so very little brain.”

  The hour was now late. The band, tired but valiant, had reached the end of its repertoire and recommenced Sweet Sue. Primed by champagne, the Consuls, the American business men had captured the Christmas spirit, towards the promotion of which the fat proprietress was now passing from table to table with a supply of paper hats. At the bar the man Mariano had embarked upon what he no doubt f
irmly believed to be the conquest of the cabaret artiste who had fallen. His former companions, Juan and Inez, had not accepted the change of programme so philosophically. As Rumbold and the woman rose to dance, Juan rose in his turn.

  “This lady is with us, I think,” he said. “You have spoken with her long enough.”

  Brave words, reinforced by the clenched fist, the high heel poised in readiness: the space between the tables was small. Rumbold trod upon the tiny toes prepared to kick, and grasped the fist, as if in friendship.

  “Who are you with?” he said pleasantly, to the woman.

  “Oh, I think I am with you, you know,” she said.

  “Little boys should be in bed by this time . . . no?” said Rumbold. He reinforced his grip upon the fist. “No, don’t kick,” he said to Inez. “For little boys have brittle knuckles.”

  He released the fist. Juan, his face pale with pain, steadied himself against the table. The girl, her lips drooping, looked contemptuous. Together they watched the English couple join the dancers. Then they searched the still warm seat for cigarettes or fallen change; but of course Rumbold had left nothing.

  Six

  “Come in and have a drink,” she said. He paid off the taxi. The night porter, summoned, illuminated a table lamp in the curtained, frowsty lounge, and went in search of whisky.

  “We might get to know one another better,” she began.

  “But I leave for Lisbon in two days.”

  “Me too. I shall be spending Christmas at the Aviz. Then, like yourself, I go to England. We might join forces: that is my suggestion.”