A Difficult Young Man (10 page)

Dominic, bewildered and almost resentful, muttered something and left the room again.

‘He might express gratitude for getting off so lightly,' grumbled Steven.

‘I think he wants in some way to make amends,' said Laura.

‘First of all he causes us worry and loss,' said Steven. ‘Then he insists that we shall have the further unpleasantness of punishing him. I'm blowed if I'll gratify him to that extent.'

‘I'm exhausted,' said Diana. ‘I must go home and tell Wolfie to say nothing about it.'

She was too late, Wolfie, rather pleased than otherwise at his performance, had rung up Baba to say that he had spoken severely to Dominic, who had lost his temper and gone out and ridden Tamburlaine to death. Nothing could have delighted Baba more. She spent the next hour at the telephone, ringing up everyone she knew and passing on the news in an orgy of moral indignation.

CHAPTER VI

DOMINIC
STAYED
down at Beaumanoir, although it meant exposing himself to the obloquy of his relatives, rather than return to Westhill where he would doubly suffer the loss of Tamburlaine, as without a horse he would have nothing to do.

The estate was paying for the upkeep of Beaumanoir during the settling up, and therefore all the legatees thought themselves entitled to use the place, though Laura had the burden of running it. She never knew how many would turn up for a meal, and if she ordered the brougham to keep an appointment, she might be told that Mrs Von Flugel had taken it for the afternoon. It was difficult to run a house that was being looted. On the evening of his return from Westhill Dominic went into the ravished drawing-room, where all those
treasures which Alice had gathered in her European wanderings, glass from Venice, amorini from Rome, Battersea enamel and huge rosaries from Compostella, were piled in heaps to go to the houses of her different children. He touched them gently, and in a voice of deep sorrow said, ‘Grannie's things!' This tenderness was displayed within twenty-four hours of his riding Tamburlaine to death.

Beaumanoir was like a castle which children throughout a long summer's day have proudly built on the sands, walled and moated and with a garden laid out and planted with sprigs of tamarisk for trees. Then the tide is rising and it is time to go home. The children run and jump gleefully on the thing they have created. During the month following Alice's death, her children and grandchildren were like those on the sands. We did not realize as we swarmed over the place, gathering our fallen crumbs, that we were ending the kind of existence we had known hitherto. There had always been this house, rich and lively, full of good food and kindness and the source of frequent presents, where we could escape the occasional dullness of our own homes.

Hitherto Alice's grandchildren has been like one family, and our cousins were as familiar to us as our brothers. Where she was we collected like bees, or flies, round a honeypot. Now, in a last swarm we buzzed round the emptying pot, not realizing that when it was gone there would be little to keep us together, and
that there would be no more of that slightly freakish communal life, the Sunday sports and the matriarchal treks round Tasmania, which gave us the feeling that the chief end of man is to be amused. We also had the feeling that in the background of everyone's life, there was, as a matter-of-course, a gilded house devoted to pleasure, where riches were gathered, a share of which in due course would come to oneself. I shall never forget my shocked surprise when a friend told me that he had a poor grandmother who lived in a small cottage. I felt that it was against nature.

It is usual for three generations of mankind to be on this earth at a time. When one remains in the third, one has not only greater security of life, but in a family where there is any money, greater material security. As we snatched our pieces of loot, and even I got a fishing-rod and a book on French heraldry, we were sacking the keep of our own castle.

I have called Beaumanoir a galleon, a castle, and a honey-pot, which shows how deep an impression its dismantling must have made on me. But the real security we lost with Alice's death was of a more subtle kind. As a family we were regarded as slightly eccentric, though this may only have been because there were so many of us and we did not worry much about public opinion. Every family is eccentric when one knows it intimately. When we lived or travelled
en masse
,
our oddities did not worry us, as we were surrounded by a sufficient
number of people with our own habits and idiom to keep at bay the disdain of the bourgeois world. On Alice's death we were like the Jews after the dispersion, and anyhow we were always a little like this through our homelessness on either side of the world.

The moral indignation which Baba had breathed into her telephone, spread like a cloud over the whole family. The Beaumanoir telephone rang twice during dinner, and three times during the evening with aunts and others asking for confirmation and details. This made Steven so angry that in a quite serious voice he told absurd lies, and said: ‘Yes, it's perfectly true. Dominic has also poisoned Sarah and shot the postmistress. He is now in the Dandenong lock-up. Good night.' And he hung up the receiver.

Though Dominic did not overhear these conversations, he was aware that his disgrace was already widely established. The next day he did not appear at luncheon. He had taken his bicycle and gone off to Mordialloc, then a secluded fishing village with a few boats drawn up
on the muddy bank of a creek. He spent the day there, contentedly talking to the fishermen, absorbed in helping them with their boats, in one of which, when the tide rose in the afternoon, he went out to sea. It was always difficult to know how his mind worked. Except for his occasional obsession with the Kingdom of Heaven, he generally only thought of what he saw, unless someone deliberately brought another
image before his mind, and his whole nature responded to his surroundings. In his interest in the boats, and in the simple and wholesome pleasure of clothing his bare legs with socks of black mud, as he pushed them into the water, he was happily forgetful of his disgrace, and if he thought of that remote condition, he believed that no one would care what happened to him, or feel any anxiety as to his whereabouts or safety. He found healing in the simplicity of the fishermen who had befriended him, as before he had found it in simple fun with the servant girls.

It was after sunset when the boats returned up the creek, between the banks of dark scrub. If the fishermen had invited Dominic to stay and share their life, he might have done so, sending home a postcard in about a fortnight, to say where he was, but they did not extend their hospitality beyond tea with thick bread and apricot jam. At about nine o'clock he set off without a lamp on his bicycle, to return to Beaumanoir, where they had already been in a state of panic for three hours. He had not been seen since breakfast, and there was no limit to the speculation as to what he had done, from the most outrageous improbabilities to the most tragic disasters.

There is a story told of a soldier who had been reprimanded in the morning, failing to salute his colonel as he passed him in the afternoon. When hauled up for this he explained: ‘I thought you were still angry with me, sir.' This must have been Dominic's attitude to the family.

At Sandringham he left his bicycle in some titree, and climbed down the cliff to bathe. Floating in the warm and mysterious sea, again, fearless of sharks or stingrays, he drew that peace from the natural world which he had felt when his bare feet had ignored the adder and the dragon along the moonlit road at Rathain. When he came out of the sea he dawdled about, looking for the gleam of phosphorus where the cat-fish swam in the pools below the Red Bluff.

At last, healthily tired, having escaped encounter with a policeman, he rode in at the gates of Beaumanoir. He noted with mild curiosity that the lamps were lighted on the brick gate posts. This had been done so that a stranger, bringing back his dead or mutilated body, might distinguish the entrance. He left his bicycle in the stableyard, and entered the house by a side door, just as Laura came into the hall from the opposite side, having been on to the terrace to listen for him, as only two nights before Diana had listened at Westhill. She did not think it of any use, but the movement eased her anxiety. Dominic said innocently:

‘Hullo, mum.'

‘Where
have
you been?' she exclaimed.

‘I went to Mordialloc on my bike. I met a fisherman. He took me out in his boat and we caught a lot of flathead. I've had a lovely day.'

‘A lovely day! We've been off our heads with anxiety.'

‘Why?' asked Dominic.

‘Why!' echoed Laura. ‘Can't you imagine why? You go off for the whole day without telling anyone where you're going, and come back at midnight. Surely now you could behave sensibly for a few days, for your own sake, if no one else's?'

‘I thought you'd want me out of the way,' said Dominic,
in the mood of the reprimanded soldier.

‘We don't want you to disappear into the blue.'

‘I couldn't hang about here all day,' said Dominic. As he spoke the awareness of his disgrace returned to him, and the light of peace and contentment went out of his eyes, and a veil of loneliness darkened them. Laura could not bear to see this happen, and to be the involuntary cause of it. She wanted above all things to see that peaceful contentment in his eyes, but she felt that it would be wrong to bring it by ignoring his idiocies. She would have liked to embrace him to bring it back, but she was partly withheld by her anger, and she was always afraid to let her emotion go towards Dominic.

‘Well, at any rate you're all right,' she said. ‘You'd better go up to bed, and I'll tell them you're back.'

She said this to spare Steven the nervous strain of an interview with Dominic, as she knew, from the way that he had been talking throughout the evening, that he would be very angry when he found that there had been no occasion for their anxiety. He
would give
him a dressing down, which would do no good, but merely exhaust himself and produce in Dominic a look of dumb uncomprehending submission.

She watched him, slow and dispirited, mount the elaborate staircase, and when he turned on the half-landing, she said: ‘Good night, darling.' He
replied, ‘Good night, mum,' in a dutiful subdued voice, but he did not look down at her.

She went into the dining-room, the only place where there were still any chairs to sit on, though even from here the portraits had been removed, leaving large squares of a richer unfaded red on the wallpaper. Steven was trying to read, but Mildy continually interrupted him with explanations of Dominic's sensitive nature.

‘Dominic's back,' said Laura. ‘He rode on his bicycle to Mordialloc and went out with some fishermen.'

‘Oh, damn!' said Steven. ‘I knew we were making fools of ourselves. Why in the deuce couldn't he say where he was going? He's half-witted.'

‘He thought we didn't mind what happened to him.'

‘There!' cried Mildy. ‘That's exactly what I said.'

‘I suppose you think we should all go and apologize to him,' said Steven. ‘Anyhow, now we can go to bed. If you'll put the lights out in here, I'll lock the doors.'

He was relieved that Dominic was alive and well, though he did not share all Laura's pangs, but he did
sometimes wish that his life could be freed from the problems which apparently were inseparable from him. He hated to see people suffer, and one of his chief causes of annoyance with Dominic was that he so often and so gratuitously provided him with the spectacle. But he could see the amusing side of whatever happened, even if it was to his own disadvantage. He now began to laugh. After all, he and Laura had done nothing but make inquiries as to Dominic's whereabouts. It was the relatives who had visualized all the crimes and tragedies, and it was they who would look the fools when they heard that he had merely gone fishing at Mordialloc.

However, two days later something happened at which he could not laugh, and it looked as if Dominic was determined to outrage all their ideas of proper behaviour, and even of common decency. There are times in our lives when the Fates seem to drive us on with blows of increasing tempo, when we are hesitant about the road they intend us to take. This may not be a very acceptable explanation, but the succession of shocks which Dominic quite involuntarily gave the family at this time did cause Steven to move in a resulting direction, and when he had done so they ceased, at any rate for some years.

During the weeks of the looting of Beaumanoir the weather was warm and fine. The aunts and uncles were often there to guard their shares of the spoils, and as the
estate was paying for the running of the house, and as, with its grounds joining the sands it was the best place to bathe, they generally brought their children. When Maysie demurred about this, thinking these incursions would be troublesome to Laura, Uncle Bertie said: ‘My dear, never hesitate to take what you pay for. That way lies ruin.' So Helena was often at the house, especially as just then the Easter holidays began.

Dominic's escape to Mordialloc was partly to avoid meeting Helena. He did not see how she could fail to repudiate him utterly for his treatment of Tamburlaine. He was used to the condemnation of Baba and Bertie, and the patient disapproval of the other relatives, but if Helena turned against him he would feel himself to be the complete outcast. But when Helena arrived unexpectedly the next morning, and found him on the terrace, she called out cheerfully without any hint of reserve in her voice: ‘Hullo, Dominic!' At once he came up from the chasms of gloom. If Helena did not condemn him, he did not mind about the rest. He only realized this when he saw her. He did not think of her when he was the insulted and injured, only when hope and life sprouted again in his passionate breast.

Certainly from the moment when Helena called to him, his whole attitude changed, and if any of the other cousins had intended to show their disapproval, and to ‘send him to Coventry' they now changed their intentions, which they could never have held very
confidently. We disliked many of Dominic's actions, but we understood only too well how easy it is to be naughty. The incident of Baba's maids had been kept from us, and though we were dismayed at the death of Tamburlaine, our attitude was more: ‘Gosh! He's done it this time!' than ‘The devilish brute, he ought to be locked up.' This was our attitude towards what I am now about to reveal.

I do not know whether I saw it myself, or merely heard of it from one of the cousins, and the image which flashed into my mind was simply the flower of my immodest juvenile imagination. It is possible that I glued my eye to a hole in the door of the bathing hut where a knot had come out of the wood. I do not think I did, as I was full of propriety, and inclined to turn away both my ears and my mind, when I heard the Dell boys snigger that Dominic was ‘worshipping Helena.'