Parade's End (66 page)

It was undeniably like something moving… . All these things going in one direction… . A disagreeable force set in motion by gawky schoolboys – but schoolboys of the Sixth Form, sinister, hobbledehoy, waiting in the corners of playgrounds to torture someone, weak and unfortunate… . In one or other corner of their worldwide playground they had come upon Father Consett and hanged him. No doubt they tortured him first. And, if he made an offering of his sufferings, then and there to Heaven, no doubt he was already in paradise. Or, if he was not yet in heaven, certain of the souls in purgatory were yet listened to in the midst of their torments… .

So she said:

‘Blessed and martyred father, I know that you loved Christopher and wish to save him from trouble. I will make this pact with you. Since I have been in this room I have kept my eyes in the boat – almost in my lap. I will agree to leave off torturing Christopher and I will go into retreat in a convent of Ursuline Dames Nobles – for I can’t stand the nuns of that other convent – for the rest of my life… . And I know that will please you, too, for you were always anxious for the good of my soul… .’ She was going to do that if when she raised her eyes and really looked round the room she saw in it one man that looked presentable. She did not ask that he should more than look presentable, for she wanted nothing to do with the creature. He was to be a sign, not a prey!

She explained to the dead priest that she could not go all the world over to see if it contained a presentable man, but she could not bear to be in a convent for ever, and have the thought that there wasn’t, for other women, one presentable man in the world… . For Christopher would be no good to them. He would be mooning for ever over the Wannop girl. Or her memory. That was all one … He was content with
LOVE
… . If he knew that the Wannop girl was loving him in Bedford Park, and he in the Khyber States with the Himalayas between them, he would be quite content. That would be correct in its way, but not very helpful for other women… . Besides, if he were the only presentable man in the world, half the women would be in love with him… . And that would be disastrous, because he was no more responsive than a bullock in a fatting pen.

‘So, father,’ she said, ‘work a miracle… . It’s not very much of a little miracle. Even if a presentable man doesn’t exist you could put him there… . I’ll give you ten minutes before I look… .’

She thought it was pretty sporting of her, for, she said to herself, she was perfectly in earnest. If in that long, dim, green-lamp-shaded, and of course be-palm-leaved, badly-proportioned, glazed, ignoble public room, there appeared one decentish man, as decentish men went before this beanfeast began, she would go into retreat for the rest of her life… .

She fell into a sort of dim trance after she had looked at her watch. Often she went into these dim trances … ever since she had been a girl at school with Father Consett for her spiritual adviser! She seemed to be aware of the father moving about the room, lifting up a book and putting it down… . Her ghostly friend! … Goodness, he was unpresentable enough, with his broad, open face that always looked dirtyish, his great dark eyes, and his great mouth… . But a saint and a martyr… . She felt him there… . What had they murdered him for? Hung at the word of a half-mad, half-drunk subaltern, because he had heard the confession of some of the rebels the night before they were taken… . He was over in the far corner of the room… . She heard him say: They had not understood, the men that had hanged him. That is what you would
say,
father … Have mercy on them, for they know not what they do… .

Then have mercy on me, for half the time I don’t know what I’m doing! … It was like a spell you put on me. At Lobscheid. Where my mother was, when I came back from that place without my clothes… . You said, didn’t you, to mother, but she told me afterwards: The real hell for that poor boy, meaning Christopher, will come when he falls in love with some young girl – as, mark me, he will… . For she, meaning me, will tear the world down to get at him… . And when mother said she was certain I would never do anything vulgar you obstinately did not agree. You knew me… .

She tried to rouse herself and said: He
knew
me… . Damn it, he knew me! … What’s vulgarity to me, Sylvia Tietjens, born Satterthwaite? I do what I want and that’s good enough for anyone. Except a priest. Vulgarity! I wonder mother could be so obtuse. If I am vulgar I’m vulgar with a purpose. Then it’s not vulgarity. It may be vice. Or viciousness… . But if you commit a mortal sin with your eyes open it’s not vulgarity. You chance hell fire for ever… . Good enough!

The weariness sank over her again and the sense of the father’s presence… . She was back again in Lobscheid, thirty-six hours free of Perowne with the father and her mother in the dim sitting-room, all antlers, candle-lit, with the father’s shadow waving over the pitch-pine walls and ceilings… . It was a bewitched place, in the deep forests of Germany. The father himself said it was the last place in Europe to be Christianised. Or perhaps it was never Christianised… . That was perhaps why those people, the Germans, coming from those deep, devil-infested woods, did all these wickednesses. Or maybe they were not wicked… . One would never know properly… . But maybe the father had put a spell on her… . His words had never been out of her mind, much. At the back of her brain, as the saying was… .

Some man drifted near her and said:

‘How do you do, Mrs. Tietjens? Who would have thought of seeing you here?’

She answered:

‘I have to look after Christopher now and then.’ He remained hanging over her with a schoolboy grin for a
minute,
then he drifted away as an object sinks into deep water… . Father Consett again hovered near her. She exclaimed:

‘But the real point is, father… . Is it sporting? … Sporting or whatever it is?’ And Father Consett breathed: ‘Ah! …’ with his terrible power of arousing doubts… . She said:

‘When I saw Christopher … Last night? … Yes, it
was
last night… . Turning back to go up that hill… . And I had been talking about him to a lot of grinning private soldiers… . To
madden
him… . You
mustn’t
make scenes before the servants… . A heavy man, tired … come down the hill and lumbering up again… . There was a searchlight turned on him just as he turned… . I remembered the white bulldog I thrashed on the night before it died… . A tired, silent beast … With a fat white behind… . Tired out … You couldn’t see its tail because it was turned down, the stump… . A great, silent beast… . The vet said it had been poisoned with red lead by burglars… . It’s beastly to die of red lead… . It eats up the liver… . And you think you’re getting better for a fortnight. And you’re always cold … freezing in the blood-vessels… . And the poor beast had left its kennel to try and be let into the fire… . And I found it at the door when I came in from a dance without Christopher… . And got the rhinoceros whip and lashed into it. There’s a pleasure in lashing into a naked white beast… . Obese and silent, like Christopher… . I thought Christopher might … That night … It went through my head … It hung down its head… . A great head, room for a whole British encyclopædia of misinformation, as Christopher used to put it. It said: “What a hope!” … As I hope to be saved, though I never shall be, the dog said: “What a hope!” … Snow-white in quite black bushes… . And it went under a bush. They found it dead there in the morning. You can’t imagine what it looked like, with its head over its shoulder, as it looked back and said: “What a hope!” to me… . Under a dark bush. An eu … eu … euonymus, isn’t it? … In thirty degrees of frost with all the blood-vessels exposed on the naked surface of the skin… . It’s the seventh circle of hell, isn’t it? The frozen one … The last stud-white hope of the Groby Tory breed… . Modelling himself on our Lord… . But our Lord was
never
married. He never touched on topics of sex. Good for Him… .’

She said: ‘The ten minutes is up, father …’ and looked at the round, starred surface between the diamonds of her wrist-watch. She said: ‘Good God! … Only one minute… . I’ve thought all that in only a minute… . I understand how hell can be an eternity… .’

Christopher, very weary, and ex-Sergeant-Major Cowley, very talkative by now, loomed down between palms. Cowley was saying: ‘It’s infamous! … It’s past bearing… . To re-order the draft at eleven… .’ They sank into chairs. Sylvia extended towards Tietjens a small packet of letters. She said: ‘You had better look at these… . I had your letters sent to me from the flat as there was so much uncertainty about your movements… .’ She found that she did not dare, under Father Consett’s eyes, to look at Tietjens as she said that. She said to Cowley: ‘We might be quiet for a minute or two while the captain reads his letters… . Have another liqueur? …’

She then observed that Tietjens just bent open the top of the letter from Mrs. Wannop and then opened that from his brother Mark:

‘Curse it,’ she said, ‘I’ve given him what he wants! … He knows… . He’s seen the address … that they’re still in Bedford Park… . He can think of the Wannop girl as there… . He has not been able to know, till now, where she is… . He’ll be imagining himself in bed with her there… .’

Father Consett, his broad, unmodelled dark face full of intelligence and with the blissful unction of the saint and martyr, was leaning over Tietjens’ shoulder… . He must be breathing down Christopher’s back as, her mother said, he always did when she held a hand at auction and he could not play because it was between midnight and his celebrating the holy mass.

She said:

‘No, I am not going mad… . This is an effect of fatigue on the optic nerves… . Christopher has explained that to me … He says that when his eyes have been very tired with making one of his senior wrangler’s calculations he has often seen a woman in an eighteenth-century dress looking into a drawer in his bureau… . Thank God, I’ve
had
Christopher to explain things to me… . I’ll never let him go… . Never, never, let him go… .’

It was not, however, until several hours later that the significance of the father’s apparition came to her and those intervening hours were extraordinarily occupied – with emotions, and even with action. To begin with, before he had read the fewest possible words of his brother’s letter, Tietjens looked up over it and said:

‘Of course you will occupy Groby… . With Michael… . Naturally the proper business arrangements will be made… .’ He went on reading the letter, sunk in his chair under the green shade of a lamp… .

The letter, Sylvia knew, began with the words: ‘Your – of a wife has been to see me with the idea of getting any allowance I might be minded to make you transferred to herself. Of course she can have Groby, for I shan’t let it, and could not be bothered with it myself. On the other hand, you may want to live at Groby with that girl and chance the racket. I should if I were you. You would probably find the place worth the – what is it? ostracism, if there was any. But I’m forgetting that the girl is not your mistress unless anything has happened since I saw you. And you probably would want Michael to be brought up at Groby, in which case you couldn’t keep the girl there, even if you camouflaged her as governess. At least I think that kind of arrangement always turns out badly: there’s bound to be a stink, though Crosby of Ulick did it and nobody much minded. But it was mucky for the Crosby children. Of course if you want your wife to have Groby she must have enough to run it with credit, and expenses are rising damnably. Still, our incomings rise not a little, too, which is not the case with some. The only thing I insist on is that you make plain to that baggage that whatever I allow her, even if it’s no end of a hot income, not one penny of it comes out of what I wish you would allow me to allow you. I mean I want you to make plain to that rouged piece – or perhaps it’s really natural, my eyes are not what they were – that what you have is absolutely independent of what she sucks up as the mother of our father’s heir and to keep our father’s heir in the state of life that is his due. I hope you feel satisfied that the boy is your son, for it’s more than I should be, looking at the party. But even if
he
is not he is our father’s heir all right and must be so treated.

‘But be plain about that, for the trollop came to me, if you please, with the proposal that I should dock you of any income I might propose to allow you – and to which of course you are absolutely entitled under our father’s will, though it is no good reminding you of that! – as a token from me that I disapproved of your behaviour when, damn it, there is not an action of yours that I would not be proud to have to my credit. At any rate in this affair, for I cannot help thinking that you could be of more service to the country if you were anywhere else but where you are. But you know what your conscience demands of you better than I and I dare say these hellcats have so mauled you that you are glad to be able to get away into any hole. But don’t let yourself die in your hole. Groby will have to be looked after, and even if you do not live there you can keep a strong hand on Sanders, or whoever you elect to have as manager. That monstrosity you honour with your name – which is also mine, thank you! – suggested that if I consented to let her live at Groby she would have her mother to live with her, in which case her mother would be good to look after the estate. I dare say she would, though she has had to let her own place. But then almost everyone else has. She seems anyhow a notable woman, with her head screwed on the right way. I did not tell the discreditable daughter that she – her mother – had come to see me at breakfast immediately after seeing you off, she was so upset. And she
keawert ho down i’ th’ ingle and had a gradely pow
. You remember how Gobbles the gardener used to say that. A good chap, though he came from Lancasheere! The mother has no illusions about the daughter and is heart and soul for you. She was dreadfully upset at your going, the more so as she believes that it’s her offspring has driven you out of the country and that you purpose – isn’t stopping one the phrase? Don’t do that.