Charles Palliser (8 page)

I particularly resented my afternoon walks because the village-children used to jeer at me when they saw me walking with my mother or Sukey as if I were under guard, and so I used to run on as far ahead of my escort as I could in order to look as if I were alone. I envied the children for running barefoot in the summer when I used to see them on the Green playing their elaborate games of chuck-farthing and kiss-in-the-ring and drop-the-handkerchief. And on the long summer evenings I watched them playing at shuttlecock in the wide street from the front windows of the house.

Above all, and later, as I grew bigger and my walks extended further, I envied the boys of my age whom I sometimes heard shouting above our heads where they were bird-nesting in the high branches or whom I glimpsed in the A WISE CHILD

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distance swimming in the river — the white flash of their bodies visible as they dived from the bank. Once or twice while I was walking with Sukey we met one of her brothers, especially Harry who was only a few years my senior, and he always seemed to be doing exciting things: helping to drive cattle, or tenting crows, or harvesting. And quite often it came about that we fell in with Job and that he happened to be walking our way.

I liked Job, particularly because, when he and Sukey were not giggling and whispering to each other, he told me about the things he had done as a boy. He had been very keen on swimming and I conceived the idea that he might be permitted to teach me.

I asked my mother about this and at last she agreed.

And so one fine Sunday afternoon that summer, Job and I went to the mill-pond on the river at Twycott. He was a good teacher and on that first day I learned a great deal. I was impressed by the way he dived from the bank and swam underwater and I envied this ability and yet was terrified of the thought of emulating him, especially when he would swim beneath the water-gate of the abandoned mill. He tried to teach me but seeing how frightened I was, he desisted and contented himself with improving my skill in merely swimming.

Our lessons became a regular occurrence on Sundays, and afterwards Job would walk home with me to have tea in the kitchen with Sukey and Mrs Belflower. One day only a few weeks later, however, Sukey told me with tears in her eyes that I would not be seeing him again for a very long time. He had gone to “ ’list” as a soldier. (She told me that this was because of the way Mr Emeris — prompted by Bissett — was pursuing him with his suspicions of involvement in the burgling of our house.) I was so disappointed at this interruption of my swimming-lessons that my mother had the idea of asking Sukey if the eldest of her young brothers, Harry, could continue the lessons. She looked a little doubtful at this but said she thought it could be arranged.

So next Sunday it was Harry who accompanied me to the river, largely in silence for he spoke rarely and seemed uninterested in my conversation. He was a well-built, straw-haired lad with a big jaw and pale blue eyes. His approach was much more pragmatic than Job’s for he insisted that I should first of all learn to stay under the water in order to overcome my natural fear of it, and his conviction that this was desirable seemed to increase when he found how frightened I was at the prospect. To this end he seized me with relish and held me under the surface while I struggled and fought. I really believed I was drowning and I recollect that when he at last released me and I pulled myself onto the bank and lay there gasping and spluttering, I was sure that I was going to die. I looked at a nearby gate — just an ordinary gate into a field — and I recall to this day how it looked exactly like a picture in a frame. And for several days I found that everything I looked at seemed to be framed in this way, as if I were seeing it for the first time.

Strangely enough, Harry’s method seemed to work, for my fear of being underwater vanished and I became so skilful that he and I would compete to see who could swim fastest beneath the sluice of the water-gate. But the following summer he was too busy with his work to continue to teach me and my mother refused to let me swim alone —

though I was privately convinced that I was safer without than with my professor.

I turned more and more towards books. Parcels of them arrived regularly from Uncle Marty and there were, besides, many in the house. I read whatever was in 32 THE

HUFFAMS

the library (by which I should be understood to mean, scattered throughout the house for there was no room set aside for that purpose) and soon discerned that there were several distinct categories. There were new books sent to my mother and myself from London and these were romances, novels, tales for children, and so on. Then there were much older volumes — none of them less than fifty or sixty years old — most of which were on dry and dreary subjects connected with estate management and farming, but there were also books of history and travel among these as well as a Latin primer. I knew they formed a distinct group for, apart from their age, they had very plain book-plates with only a heraldic design of an eagle, above which were the initials “D. F.” These were to be distinguished from another group of books that were for the most part twenty or thirty years old and from which the book-plates seemed to have been removed. These volumes were entirely devoted to the subject of law and I put them aside in disgust. And finally there were a number which I supposed to have belonged to my mother when she was my age, though I was not sure of this because there was no name inscribed inside them. To speak more accurately, in all but a few instances the edge of the fly-leaf had been cut off.

Now that I could read for myself I perused all of
The Arabian Nights
— those exotic but often brutal and even indecent stories from whose full force my mother had tried to shield me. I particularly enjoyed the long tale in which the resourceful — but, as it seemed to me, surely often unscrupulous! — youth Alia ad Deen plunged into a series of extraordinary adventures as a result of which he was able to enrich his impoverished mother. And now I read to the very end the tale of Syed Naomaun who followed his wife to the graveyard one night and found her with a female goul.

I contracted the habit — or acquired the ability, for I do not know which to call it — of losing myself (or perhaps finding myself ?) in a book and cutting myself off from the world. (And, to anticipate for a moment, this was often to prove very useful.) I read works of philosophy, travel, history and literature before I even knew what these words meant or how to distinguish between them. The strange bye-ways I wandered down, the vistas I glimpsed, the dark windings I passed through — all these I cannot hope to enumerate. Though often confused and befogged I was constantly excited by a glimpse of something vast and profound and mysterious. I lost myself amid the spacious

“orotund lucubrations” of the last century (the great Cham), or the helter-skelter rushing of the drama and prose of the century before. I read — and above all in Shakespeare — of passions whose nature I often could not understand but whose expression thrilled me. I read about the lepers who roamed England hundreds of years ago ringing a bell and crying out “Unclean! Unclean!” with hoods over their faces to hide their ravaged features until they became too infirm, when the Burial service was read over them and they were locked away in leper-houses. Curious to know how the truth about the East matched the
Arabian Tales
I had loved so much, I devoured travellers’ tales and read of hereditary and secret castes of worshippers of many-headed goddesses who strangled their arbitrarily-chosen victims by night as sacrifices to their deities, or of other votaries who hurled themselves to their death beneath the wheels of the great waggons carrying an image of their god. And I read of the hated and reviled Indian caste that only crept out at night to remove the night-soil.

My mother had long read Sir Walter Scott’s works to me and now that I grew older I began to read his romances for myself — those works in which narrative A WISE CHILD

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and history are so adroitly blended and made to change places. Perhaps because of my reading of history-books, I became fascinated by the past, and always wanted to know how things had come into being. My elders could not satisfy my curiosity except that Mrs Belflower told me stories of the great families of the locality, but her tales seemed to me not to be historical for they were never precisely placed in time.

I became more and more curious to know about the past. Where had I come from?

Where had my mother lived? She hated to be asked and would tell me nothing beyond the bare fact that she had grown up in London. Now that it was borne in upon me that we were not of the village, I was filled with a desire to belong, to have roots, to know of a past before I was born.

The only clew I had to follow lay in the books. I looked more closely at those which I assumed had belonged to my mother. And now in a few cases I found the letters “M. H.”

written in a corner of the fly-leaf and since I knew that my mother’s name was Mary, I assumed that the initials were hers. Now I examined the law-books which I had earlier cast aside and noticed that although they had once had a book-plate pasted in, all of these had been torn out. However, since this had not always been done very well, by comparing a number of them I was able to reconstruct the original. This took the form of a shield with the familiar design of the five quatre-foil roses. Above it were the words

“Ex libris J. H.” and beneath it another line of writing which, as I gradually re-assembled it, I found to be the mysterious words:
Tula rosa coram spinis.
This was very puzzling, but by now the time was approaching when my mother had promised to satisfy my curiosity on this subject and others, and so I was prepared to wait as patiently as I could until Christmas.

I suspected that the words were in Latin. This language was not one of the subjects my mother had undertaken to instruct me in, but I recognised it from church on Sundays when we attended divine service. And it was on one of these occasions that something happened that I must now describe.

It was autumn and as we walked to church that morning — my mother in her yellow silk gown with her merino cloak and best bonnet and I in my top boots, blue coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, and creamy breeches — the season’s combination of fullness and foreboding was in the air. The chestnuts were bursting from their sheaths and we passed several young men carrying baskets of hazel-nuts, filberts and beech-nuts that they had been into the woods early to gather, following the tradition of the village, in order to give to the girl they admired. And the martins were clustered on the chimneys and thatch of the cottages ready for their departure.

As usual we slipped into our little boxed pew (we had our sitting far away at the back and behind a pillar) before almost anyone else had arrived. And so while the church orchestra of clarionets, trumpets, trombones, bassoons, French horns, fiddles, and bass-viols buzzed and twittered as they tuned their instruments, I watched Mr Emeris —

holding his mace before him with stately dignity — usher the great ones of the parish through the throng of villagers who were already standing in the body of the church and now parted respectfully, and into their boxed pews at the front. These were entailed upon the freehold of their houses and it had been a source of irritation to me ever since the beginning of my heraldic interests that we did not have one of those pews that commanded such a fine view of the chancel.

Finally the Rector, Dr Meadowcroft, ascended into the three-decker pulpit.

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THE HUFFAMS

Then Clerk Advowson at his reading-desk below called the number of the first hymn and the service began. As the orchestra wheezed and squeaked its way through the Morning Hymn I gazed as usual at the multi-coloured shadows cutting across the dust-beams that were cast by the stained glass windows.

The hymns bored me for their language was dull. But I relished many of the words and phrases of the
Book of Common Prayer
and the psalms, especially the names of the sins, which sounded too dramatic to be anything I could ever be guilty of: vengefulness, uncharitableness, idolatry, covetousness, uncleanliness and wantonness. I had no idea what many of these words meant and when I later found out I was usually disappointed that they were names for things that I already knew. The sermon, however, was the part I most looked forward to, though this was not because of anything the Rector ever said. (I had gradually realized that he had a two year cycle of sermons, modestly trusting that that would be long enough to consign them to oblivion in their hearers’ memory.) But the sermon gave me the leisure to study the pale marble memorials with which the walls near us were adorned, to try to make sense of the Latin inscriptions, and to wonder what had become of these families who were so boastful of the ancientness of their lineage and the virtues of their members. I recognised none of them except as parts of nearby village-names: le Despenser, Delamater, Mompesson, Torkard, Satchville, and Lacy which were repeated in Hampton Torkard, Stoke Mompesson, St. John’s Lacy, and so on.

From where our pew was, however, I could not properly see the most magnificent monument in the church which was up against the wall of the chancel. I knew that as soon as the service ended my mother would follow her invariable practice of leaving before anyone else and I formed the resolution on this day to try to get a closer look at it.

So when she rose during the final hymn I slipped out of the pew and advanced. When I smiled back at her I saw that she was staring at me in dismay. Undeterred, I waited up at the front and saw for the first time what happened after we had left the church : the pew-holders waited until Dr Meadowcroft had had time to take up his position at the door and then filed out, shaking hands with him and exchanging a few words.

While this was happening I went forward to look at the monument. It was like a huge high table of stone with another beneath it, and it was the lower one that struck me first for it was a skeleton lying in grinning mockery of the figure above it in exactly the same position. The effigy on top was the figure of a knight in splendid armour and with his arms folded piously across his chest. He was sculpted in cold black marble that was in places pitted and in others polished to a shine by people brushing by. The face was badly cankered by time and its expression unreadable, but the inscription on a brass inlay below his feet, though worn almost smooth, was still legible:
Geoffroi de Hougham:
Eques.
Peering more closely I saw that there was a further line beneath:
Tuta rosa coram
spinis.