A Difficult Young Man (21 page)

‘Yes, of course,' I replied.

In spite of this, it was decided that if I agreed to work in what were usually my holidays, when they thought it might be cheaper and easier to find an undergraduate to teach me during the Long Vacation, I might go with Uncle George.

George's motive in taking me, though it may have had an element of kindness, was not very admirable. He pretended that he wanted to revisit the places he had known when he was quartered in Ireland with the militia. He had once met Terence Byngham, the present owner of Kilawly, the place after which our grandparents' house in St Kilda was named, who, discovering the slight connection between them, asked him to stay if ever he should be in Ireland. To take me, whose mother was a Byngham, gave him a better excuse for using this invitation than if he had gone alone. It also gave an air of innocency to the excursion, the real object of which was, as we shall see, if understandable, not very innocent.

We first went to the dreary site of his camp, where we were both extremely bored. We then went across country to County Sligo. George had written to Cousin Terence who had invited us both to stay. The morning after our arrival he said to me:

‘D'you like being here?'

‘It's marvellous,' I replied, believing it was so, having only spent a very riotous evening playing games
with my young third cousins whom I had never seen before.

‘Would you like to stay on for a few days while I go to see some old friends in Mayo? It wouldn't be very interesting for you there, as there are no young people in the house. Mr Byngham has asked you to stay.' He was red and confused as he made this suggestion and I thought that it was because he felt guilty at abandoning me.

I said that it would be very agreeable to me, and Uncle George left in the middle of the morning.

I think that the next few days were very unhappy for some of my relatives, both for Dominic at Waterpark, and for Uncle George in County Mayo. The Craigs left for Australia at that time as Uncle Bertie had to return to look after his business affairs, but I expect the two most wretched were the two with whom I had least sympathy, Sylvia and Baba. The sorrow of losing what we love is nothing to the torment of having it present but denied us. Baba's sense of frustration and deprivation at George's departure on a holiday without her, and his refusal to share her interests may have little to do with love, but if it was only humiliation it was painful enough.

I was unaware of what was happening, and did not even think of it, as the young Bynghams occupied my full attention. As I have said before I regard this family as a species rather than individuals, and as I have not drawn any particular Byngham I should remind the
reader from time to time of the type. And while all these waves of feeling and clouded anxieties were continuing beyond the range of my perception, I
have the opportunity to do so, in the same way that, while the priest at the altar continues with the Liturgy, the choir sings a motet of Palestrina or Anerio, until the climax of the service suddenly breaks on us with the splendid and dramatic chant: ‘. . . Throughout all ages, world without end.' This is not an irreverent analogy, as there is a sense in which the whole of life as it is lived out in its passion, is the substance of the Liturgy. This may be truer of the life of Dominic than of most of us.

It was filtered through the Byngham veins that his Teba blood came to him. Their name sounds English, but they were of Scottish origin, having migrated north in the reign of King Stephen, or thereabouts. Here, with that aplomb which was their most evident characteristic, they seized monarchs, married their daughters, conducted raids, were executed and generally upset the kingdom, though always behaving with the greatest courtesy and generosity. In this way their name became a legend of chivalry. They were generally penniless and frequently fled to England, where they died in poverty, or to France to receive ‘a baron's pay of four shillings a day.' In
the seventeenth century a cadet branch settled in Ireland, where they retained most of their characteristics except that of intruding violently into high politics. Their estate was small,
but their lively and confident manner enabled them to marry into the great landowning families of the west of Ireland. Wherever they went they kept their ‘life-style.' An American book called
The Bynghams of Blue River
opens with a description of a rambling country house, with all the round rosy-faced Byngham sons sitting on a paddock fence, appraising the form of young racehorses. It was an exact picture of my Byngham uncles at Kilawly near Melbourne. It was also an exact picture of my Byngham cousins at Kilawly, County Sligo. They survived almost miraculously. All these boys were going to Eton, paid for by an aunt who had married a rich Belfast linen-manufacturer. We were waited on by two men, but I had seen the butler earlier in the day bedding out petunias, and the footman in white cotton gloves was, I was sure, the youth who in the morning had bicycled up the drive in a postman's cap.

My cousins were all pure Byngham in type, ruddy and cheerful as the baron who had tucked King James III under his arm and galloped off to Edinburgh. Their faces were not darkened by Teba blood nor their noses pointed with Langton wit. They were all destined for good regiments, but what would happen to their broods of ruddy sons, whom they were certain to beget? Would more aunts turn up in the thicket to educate them, at least to enable them to go into a line regiment? Here they would be half-respected and half-despised for their candour and simplicity, and they would soon retire to ride buck-jumpers in Canada,
unable to accommodate themselves to the society of soldiers who had become too professional, or to the vile methods of modern war.

They would not know why they disliked their surroundings, as their lives having conformed for so many centuries to a definite pattern were more instinctive than directed by the mind. Perhaps we may soon find a young Byngham selling newspapers at the entrance to the Green Park Tube, who, when we ask for a copy of 
Punch
which we occasionally buy in pious memory of our grandparents, apologises with the greatest concern for our disappointment, and in an accent which was noble before the foundation of Oxford, though he addresses us as ‘Governor,' explains regretfully that he only sells the
Evening News
.
We wonder how a youth with those level-lidded eyes and that manner can earn his living in such a way, not realizing that it is they which make all others impossible to him, and with this young Byngham we exchange a certain recognition, like two exiled gods, Zeus and Hermes, each seeing in the other's eyes a reflection of Olympus, though he may also sell us a tip for the Cesarewitch.

Even so, the snob who takes his vice seriously would be more gratified to associate with the newsboy at the Green Park Tube, than with any ‘leader of society,' just as a collector will value more a stained and mildewed Memlinc found in the cellar, than a two-acre canvas by a Victorian Royal Academician. That is really what I am seeking for throughout this book, the Memlinc in
the cellar, the beautiful portrait of the human face, lost in the dissolution of our family and our religion.

I am doubtless romanticizing the Bynghams, but there is an element of truth in what I write, which is all I ever claim. Also everyone romanticizes what interests him. I have seen a scientific don, several stages further removed from human semblance than Colonel Rodgers, incandescent with emotion as he foresaw the time when man could receive all necessary nourishment from one pill a day.

However, my Sligo cousins were still far from the Green Park Tube. For breakfast they ate enormous quantities of eggs, fish and devilled chickens' legs. It did not seem that much of it would go to nourish their brains, though it might strengthen their hearts. They were most friendly to me, and as I felt none of that slight reserve, that withheld judgment which I had noticed in English boys, I expanded joyfully in their company, at least until we went out to the stable yard. Seeing that I came from Australia, as a compliment they put me on the most spirited horse they possessed, which was called Harlequin. We went off to spend the morning galloping about the fields and bogs. When we turned for home I could not control my mount, but tore like the wind, soared over a five-barred gate, and re-entered the yard clinging round the horse's neck. The young centaurs roared with Homeric laughter. At luncheon, for which surprisingly they had detached their human
torsos from their animal legs, they called me ‘The wild man from Borneo,' and in the afternoon we went out to repeat the performance. Every night I prayed for the return of Uncle George.

After a week during which, owing to the intervention of the Holy Angels or the influence of the stars, or some other agency which we are told does not exist, I did not break my neck, Uncle George returned like his patron who released the maiden from the dragon. Cousin Terence, his wife and their blue-eyed brood gave me a warm invitation to come again, which I suppose I accepted with effusions of gratitude, but I was determined never again to enter the home of my maternal ancestors. As when I left my school, I was unable to sit down without suffering.

To recapture much that I write here I have to brood for some hours over the period of which I am writing, but the long railway journey back to Dublin comes easily to my mind. This is not so much because of Uncle George's gloomy silence or the pain in my own body, which compelled me to stand for long intervals at the carriage window, but because of a trivial incident. At Athlone I had bought some biscuits. I offered some to George but he refused them, so I absently went on munching until I had eaten them all myself. Soon he emerged from his despondency, and not noticing they were finished he said:

‘I would like a biscuit.'

I was filled with shame, and at that moment, in a
flash of sympathy, I saw what a dreadful state he was in. Tentatively I asked him what he had done while I was at Kilawly, and if he had enjoyed his visit to Ballinreagh. He said yes, but was not otherwise communicative. I asked him who was there. He said Mr and Mrs Stuart, whom he had known in his militia days. I asked if there was anyone else there and he said:

‘Mrs Stuart's sister, Miss Dolly Potts.'

He thought this would convey nothing to me, but I nearly whistled. It was never mentioned in his presence so he could not be aware that ever since I could remember I had known the legend of Uncle George and Dolly Potts, and how their engagement had been broken off with mutual sorrow during the trek from Brittany, because of the attitude of her horrible old father. Whenever Baba had been particularly disagreeable I had heard Laura and my aunts say: ‘What a dreadful pity he didn't marry Dolly Potts.' Her name had as much romantic association for us as that of Guinevere or the Lily Maid of Astolat. Even if I had not known all this, the way that George said: ‘Dolly Potts' revealed to my juvenile perception that he had great difficulty in doing so without bursting into tears.

Because of the pure Christianity of my mental climate, though, to change the metaphor, the soil was shallow, one aspect of my emotional development had been delayed, and this had kept me sexually indeterminate until a year or more after this visit to Ireland. My
tenderness of heart could be wounded by almost any creature. To me the perfect symbol of love was Our Lord with the beautiful youth lying on His Breast at supper, and all other love was an extension of this, an extension which included Colonel Rodgers's attachment to Dominic, and George's lifelong devotion to Dolly Potts. This attitude, though on a lofty spiritual plane, could appear to a magistrate extremely immoral. So with that mixture of knowing and unknowing to which I have referred, I was upset that George was hurt in his love, though I would have been horrified at the scandal and disruption of a divorce.

When we arrived back at Waterpark it was evident that during the Byngham motet, the situation had changed. Dominic was still engaged to Sylvia, but no one was talking of the wedding. He did not go to Dilton very frequently and everyone wondered why Sylvia did not break off the engagement. She had gone out of her life-style in becoming engaged to Dominic, and did not want to admit it was a failure, though it is probable that even if she had never met him she would have been like many ambitious girls, who in their first bloom raise their matrimonial sights so high that they miss the target, and then later, betrayed perhaps by the sensuality which often accompanies snobbery, in desperation marry ‘beneath' them, someone who is unrelieved bourgeois, and they spend their lives in struggling, he to reach and she to retain the position to which she was born. More than this, she felt that in exploring
the dark reaches of his soul she would have a fuller and more exciting life than she would ever have with a conventional landowner or a fair and clipped guardee, who would have been a normal match for her. The very arrogance with which he walked into Dilton, when he did go, as if he were conferring an immense favour on the whole family, especially as he was quite unconscious of it, must have attracted the mean side of her nature. Sylvia, like many of the landed gentry was, as Matthew Arnold has observed, a barbarian, but she was a cold northern barbarian, with her savage tastes strictly canalized, and only released in certain directions, in field sports and in safe insolence. Dominic was the genuine article, the full-blooded barbarian resplendent from the south, and she could not let him go. Ultimately Aunt Baba released her.

It was now early August and Aunt Baba had arrived back at Waterpark. She would have thought it shocking to remain in London after the end of July. Cousin Emma, who could not afford to go away, had pulled down the blinds and was living in the back of the house. George and I arrived about teatime, and amidst all the lively affection of our greetings, it was noticeable that he barely nodded to her. She came down to dinner with her eyes red from weeping. It was almost as startling as if we had seen the village policeman crying. Somehow we knew, either that evening or within a day or two that George had asked her to divorce him, and that Dolly Potts had agreed to go away with him if
Baba would proceed with the divorce, but not otherwise. It is perhaps time that I applied the glaze of my adult understanding to soften the outlines of the hard and repellent portrait I have given of Baba. Her situation was really pitiable. It was not her fault that as a child she had been inculcated with the belief that the most important thing in life was to secure a husband in a good position, which was not unusual at that time. Sylvia, on her level had the same belief until she was side-tracked by Dominic, though Sylvia wanted a peer, and Baba only someone who was invited to dine in Toorak. As she was devoid and ignorant of the qualities in George which alone could have made it possible for them to share life, she could not see the impertinence of her marrying him, and when he asked for the divorce thought him not only immoral, but brutal.