What Happened at Hazelwood? (9 page)

‘Is that a promise?’ He flushed. ‘I’m – I’m only sixteen.’

‘It’s a promise that I’ll come to you. And now be off. Clean knives. Polish Mrs Gerard’s exquisite Australian shoes.’

Timmy Owdon sprang to his feet, and his face was radiant with its wicked, eager smile. ‘Your ladyship,’ he said, ‘should be about and caring for your guests. I will send your ladyship’s ladyship as fast as a stick can drive her up the back stairs.’

And he was gone. I finished my tea and stared blankly into the empty cup. One cannot hold such a conversation as this with a houseboy – even though he be obscurely one of the family – without feeling oneself amid a dreamlike and altogether impermanent scene of things.

Mervyn kept his bed that morning; Owdon, as befitted his dignity, was not in attendance at breakfast; but everybody else was there – including Timmy, who took round coffee like an automaton. I concluded that George had judged it futile, after all, to attempt to conceal him from the Australians (and why he had in the first case been prompted to do so I could not guess), and had therefore rescinded his banishment. That everyone should appear at once was slightly surprising after the events of the night before; one would have predicted that the family would slip in one by one after cautious reconnaissance and snatch a kipper to gnaw in the garden. But there they all were in a rather distrustful circle – and Lucy passed me the marmalade.

A good deal can be put into passing the marmalade: adoration, cordiality, indifference, distaste. But what Lucy put in was hate – which is an altogether different matter. Just how she contrived it I could not now describe, but the impression was vivid enough at the time and wholly unambiguous. It was the more surprising, too, because – so far as I was aware – it was something quite new in our relations. Between sisters-in-law, I suppose, there must always be undercurrents of animosity; and these will be definite where it is a matter of a resident sister-in-law in such a queer household as ours. But why (I asked myself while doing what justice I could to marmalade so delivered)
hate
? Was it because she credited me with inspiring Gerard to pitch her precious Mervyn out of the window? Almost certainly it had to do with Mervyn in some way. For except in relation to Mervyn Lucy was surely incapable of any intensity whatever; she was a stupid, vague creature except when touched off at this one point of maternal solicitude. But here she was suddenly hating me – and (I could have sworn) studying my complexion. It was unnerving. And although the riddle had its obvious solution this just didn’t occur to me. Perhaps I was too preoccupied with Gerard.

This was because Gerard was too preoccupied with me. Timmy had made me a bit edgy and I was reckoning that one would-be protector was a little more than enough. Yet here was Gerard so carefully not looking at me that he was obviously meditating both me and my position in the household all the time. Perhaps he was intelligent enough to be wondering not only how on earth I got there but why on earth I stayed. Even in the great Australian out-back wives are presumably not serfs – so why should they be so on the estate of an English baronet? Yes, perhaps Gerard was meditating that. And last night he had been, after all, rather unnecessarily helpful. Mervyn might very well have been let alone… Gerard, who was likeable, could (I saw) also be indiscreet. And he looked as if he might be taking Timmy’s line on Lady Simney – and that on the strength of an uncommonly short acquaintance.

It is quite nauseous to be representing myself as a typical
femme fatale
– particularly if this aspect of the mystery is likely to prove to some extent a mare’s nest. And I turned now for a little relief to young Willoughby, who had always been completely negative in all his approaches to me. Vanity is nauseous too, and I must record that for a long time I attributed this disregard of Willoughby’s to the fact that we usually met in the presence of his father, and that before his father he thought it discreet to appear emotionally numb. But now as I looked at Willoughby I realized how Hazelwood – and perhaps the world at large – had corrupted me; I couldn’t look at a man without thinking of him as thinking about a woman. Whereas men have a good many other things to think about. Or rather the conjoined clamorousness and futility of the woman-business obliges them to think of other things for the sake of sanity. Hence the world’s achievement of what is called culture. And hence the brooding and abstracted quality in Willoughby’s eye. He was thinking of a girl down in the village – but thinking of her in terms of mass and tint and hue. This was the simple truth about Willoughby at present. He was a young painter struggling to get going in an ungenial environment, and he wasn’t giving time to other things. I ought to have liked Willoughby for this, for I know very well what it is to be struggling to get down to a job. And yet I didn’t like Willoughby very much. I liked him only a little better than Bevis – who would certainly never meditate mass and tint and hue, nor approve of his son’s doing so – and who was now treating Hippias to a blameless dissertation on the cross-fertilization of wheat.

I looked at George. And it came to me uncertainly that he was indeed in some obscure way cornered, and that he was resolved to go down with flying colours. Or perhaps it would be better to say that he was resolved to go down with another feather in his cap. Joyleen was feather-headed enough, heaven knows.

George was experienced. On what was only a rudimentary problem he expended only a rudimentary technique. Last night he had given the girl one look and then ignored her; this morning he was all over her with everything a bad baronet can muster. He talked horses; it became evident that Bondi has a substantial acquaintance with the brutes; presently the affair turned from trot to canter and from canter to shameless gallop. And no sooner was this accomplished metaphorically than it was repeated in actual fact. Within half an hour of first putting fork to bacon Joyleen was standing in the hall in riding things. And within ten minutes of that again the two of them were disappearing through the park. Joyleen was mounted on my mare.

Bevis continued to play the gentleman farmer. And Hippias, who this morning was thoughtful if not subdued, made civil replies. But Hippias was not unaware of what had occurred, and I could see him look sidelong at his son with a speculative eye.

Whether Gerard was learning anything it was impossible to say. If these people had come from Australia on some great rackety mailboat (as I suppose they had) it would be a fair guess that he had seen Joyleen show a clean pair of heels like this often enough. But now it did seem to me as if he was startled; perhaps he didn’t reckon on a host and elderly cousin behaving so forthrightly like a casual lounger on a liner. But certainly he wasn’t absorbed in this disagreeable business to the exclusion of all else. Gerard (as I’ve said before) was turning me over in his mind; as far as he was concerned I was Hazelwood’s principal mystery, and whatever had been on the carpet the night before took distinctly a second place. That he should thus be as much and as rapidly concerned with George’s wife as George was with his was piquant enough in a way, and the fact that Gerard’s interest was no doubt as blameless-seeming to himself as George’s was downright carnal only refined upon the situation when viewed in a comic light. But I was far from wanting to invoke the Comic Spirit over Hazelwood that day. And I particularly didn’t want to be meditated as a mystery.

My first impulse was simply to clear out for the morning. And, as a matter of fact, that was what I presently did. But, of course, running away is never much good. There is that book of Conrad’s in which it is only the coward who comes to a really nasty end. And when I did run away it was to bump into something at least a good deal nastier than if I had stayed put.

First, however, I decided to have it out with Gerard. I wanted to explain to him quite simply that I was not a captive princess guarded by an ogre; that I was just not to be regarded as interesting in that way; that I distinctly liked him here and now but saw no future for him as a knight-errant… And to create an opportunity for the delivery of this little homily I led Gerard off to look at the orangery.

When we got there I ought to have plunged straight ahead. The thing could only be said pretty baldly and I ought to have submitted to that. But for a fatal half-minute I beat about the bush – and in that short time lost ground which I had to struggle to recover. I don’t mean that I at all felt like falling in love with this Australian Simney; but I did feel in him a simple human warmth which made me baulk rather at my frosty programme. Gerard was like a genuine piece of warmth amid the artificial climate – the product of steam-heating – into which I had led him. Incidentally it was the orangery, and the wilderness of greenhouses beyond, which gave him the initiative. He laughed at them.

Gerard looked at the orange trees and palms beneath their immense cupola of glass and chuckled. He looked at the long corridors of glass with their closely pruned vines and laughed outright. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I know that it is quite august to have an orangery. And quite silly to be amused at it merely because in one’s own country oranges and lemons grow in the back yard, and muscatels proliferate like a pest in suburban gardens, and housewives work frantically to turn a fraction of their peaches into jam. Our schoolbooks, which are filled with the colonial inferiority complex, loudly assert that England is very cold and very grey and very wet – whereas we have summer skies that sparkle with a myriad dyes. It is very absurd, and undoubtedly your Nordic climate is both an economic and a spiritual asset. But what about the emotions? Of course there are plenty of robustly animal ones galloping about.’ And Gerard’s glance went out through the steamy glass of the orangery and across the snow-covered park. ‘But others must sometimes grow discouraged, I think, and harbour under ground.’ He turned back and looked at me. ‘More discouraged than the snowdrops, that will, after all, still thrust a single slender green spear through.’

Well, that was that. Gerard, like Timmy, thought me hard. And Gerard himself was perhaps ever so slightly soft – or at least subject to little eddies of poetical feeling which manifested themselves in ‘an uncolonial cadence. I looked at him cautiously. He wasn’t deliberately leading to anything with this talk – in this more honest than myself, who had been proposing to edge in something I designed to say.

So again I was checked for a moment. And again he got ahead of me. And with the same spontaneity.

‘Do you believe in fidelity?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘There is a sense in which it is unnatural. We are none of us so faithful as we think. They say – psychologists who study such things – that it is just a matter of having thicker skins.’

I looked at Gerard in perplexity. ‘Thicker skins?’

‘Just that. A thicker skin of morality, or of the socially sanctioned attitudes, covering the hopeless natural promiscuity of the hidden man. What do you think of that?’

This was not the sort of talk I wanted; nevertheless I found myself considering his question carefully. ‘Without his skin,’ I said, ‘a man would be disagreeable. He would also be dead. In fact, he wouldn’t be a man. He would be a not-man.’

No doubt this was a wisp of donnish wisdom from my abortive Oxford days. But Gerard seemed to suppose that I had won it from a void. ‘That’s just it,’ he said. ‘But I could never have put it in that way.’ Once more he looked out across the park into which George and Joyleen had vanished. ‘Did you ever think of Australia?’ he asked.

‘Not, I’m afraid, very much. Or not until last night.’

‘I mean, of possibly living there?’

This was a bit of a jolt. I looked at him squarely. ‘You mean that fidelity might make a better show in a second innings?’

‘Something like that. At my prep school we never counted the first ball. It was called a trialer.’ Gerard paused and rubbed a little steam from the glass in front of us. We were both looking at the empty park. ‘Those people,’ he said, matter-of-factly, ‘are gone, after all.’

I think it must be admitted that in this encounter Gerard Simney had me licked. He came straight at you, as Simneys do. Once upon a time George – if on something a different level – had licked me with the same quality.

But it must not be concluded from this that I was remotely moved to proceed upstairs and pack a suitcase (as somebody else, you will presently discover, was at that moment doing). For I really
was
more discouraged than the snowdrops. Indeed, this is one of the few facts that are constant and unchallengeable throughout the whole fluid George Simney affair so far. After Christopher I was finished. And George himself had been no more than the proof of that.

I was taken unawares, and I was distressed. But I was also, I’m afraid, amused – and I must have looked at Gerard with a startled smile that his small experience took for heaven knows what. The next moment I was in his arms – and feeling unutterably clumsy at having provoked that honest, unmeaning embrace. I kissed him gently and pushed him away. ‘My dear,’ I said, ‘you’ve got it utterly–’

Something like a scream of rage interrupted me, and we turned to see Grace goggling and frothing at us absurdly from behind a palm-tree. It was like an apparition – for a moment later she was gone.

We looked at each other. There was nothing for it but a good many awkward and explaining words. I just wasn’t going to have Gerard feeling abased. Twenty minutes later we parted, very good friends.

I put on galoshes – in such things it is impossible to feel unduly tense about oneself – and went for a tramp in the park. Here and there the snow was dazzling beneath oblique shafts of sunlight, but to the north the sky was leaden: against it the fruit of the plane-trees, suspended on rime-covered and invisible twigs, showed like round black medals pinned at random on field-grey cloth. Hoof marks showed in which direction George and Joyleen had gone; I turned in another direction and walked until Hazelwood was sufficiently remote to be taken in as a single unit in the landscape. The Caroline front with its scroll-like gables faced me squarely, and to my left, like a casual acquaintance who has turned away and abruptly changed his expression, the later Georgian façade presented towards the village an aspect altogether more authoritative and aloof. The stable clock was striking; its strokes came to me with the peculiar quality such sounds take on over snow; I was suddenly aware of how familiar these sights and sounds ought to be to Lady Simney and how alien they were to me. If all that maturely proud and variously expensive pile had lost definition as I looked, if its vast solidity had thinned to gossamer and thence to a mere smoke fading into invisibility across the monotone sky, I should have been immensely surprised indeed, but the miracle as I watched it would have imparted no sense of loss.