Sleep in Peace (69 page)

“He was one of the Fascist stewards at Olympia,” said Madeline bluntly. “One of those who carried men out when they heckled. He came home yesterday; he's got a black eye and he doesn't want Grandfather to know.”

“Geoffrey was a Fascist steward!” exclaimed Laura. “Geoffrey! A Fascist! Geoffrey! But it's terrible! It's terrible! Oh,
no!”

“He has a right to think as he likes,” suggested Gwen in a weak deprecatory tone.

“What about other people thinking as
they
like?” cried Madeline suddenly. “What about the Communist he was hitting? Don't you dare defend him, Mother!”

Her voice was suddenly a rich, deep, resonant contralto; her cheek was warmly flushed, her grey eyes glowing. She sprang up from her chair and ran from the room.

“But how can Geoffrey have become a Fascist?” wondered Laura. “Do you know, Gwen?”

“He's had a uniform a long time,” murmured the wretched Gwen.

The tea came in, as in family life, whatever the crisis, tea always did, thought Laura; drinking it gratefully, for her throat was parched with misery, Laura tried to answer her own question. How had Geoffrey become a Fascist? How? She looked at the circumstances of Geoffrey's life: an adoring mother who allows him to do precisely as he likes, a liberal-minded father, absent, whom he hates, a tedious grandfather, a decayed business.
Or, to put it in general terms so that it serves for them all perhaps, thought Laura: ah unstable present, an uncertain future, a lack of religious or ethical teaching given with conviction, in which they can believe, an abdication of leadership on the part of the previous generation, a despairing revolt against the petty meanness of modern industrial life. And so, a desire for the opposite of all these things: a desire for everything that is brightly coloured, definite, high-sounding and dogmatic. Oh, yes; we have created them, thought Laura; we tried a path and failed, and they despise not only the failure but the path.

“If I belonged to the last generation,” thought Laura, “I should go upstairs now and shout at Geoffrey till he blubbered. But the lesson of my life, painfully, learned by my own experience, is to respect other people's convictions. So that action, probably the only one useful in the circumstances, is impossible to me.” Aloud she said: “I can't live in the same house with a Fascist.”

“Don't be silly, Laura,” said Gwen fretfully. “You'll have to.”

“No!” said Laura.

Laura, in a handsome flowing dress of cherry-coloured taffeta, stood by the buffet with a glass of champagne in her hand and accepted caviare from the plateful the waiter offered her. She did not like champagne, and found the grey-black pellets of caviare positively repulsive; but what would you? At literary-artistic parties nowadays everyone partook of these alleged dainties, and Laura did not wish to be an exception. This was the kind of life which offered itself to her, and she must adapt herself to it.

The present partv, a huge affair given by one of her new friends' publishers, was particularly glittering; in whichever direction she looked she observed stars coruscating. She herself was talking to a famous cartoonist, an American dramatist, a political writer of the Left and a very beautiful Lady Something-or-other
Something. The cartoonist and the political man were discussing the recent Nazi clean-up, while the American made supplementary comments on Ernst Rohm; it was clear that the lady was amazed and rather frightened by their bitterness, and Laura, observing her, felt a wish to draw her beautiful profile in all its vacuous perplexity. She wondered whether the cartoonist shared her wish. A few yards farther down the huge, crowded and brilliantly lighted room that well-known editor and critic Frederick Hinchliffe was talking to three famous novelists, men whose names were household words, even in Hudley. (That is to say, Geoffrey knew the titles of their books, Gwen had read one or two, and even Mr. Armistead had heard their names.) To see the three of them all together thus would have brought a gasp of admiration from any library subscriber in the West Riding. Frederick, looking pink, cheerful and rather untidy, as usual, was telling them a story. He was evidently telling it very well, for they all listened intently, hands in pockets, grin on face. Laura strained her ears to catch what he was saying, but it seemed to be something about a man who had used the same review for three different newspapers, a professional joke, beyond her comprehension.

“He said he didn't see why it was wrong,” concluded Frederick, laughing heartily.

The three famous novelists all laughed too, throwing themselves back in genuine mirth. Laura, looking with amusement between the lovely lady's beautiful dark curls and the American's long pale face, could not help thinking, as she saw Frederick so unconsciously at ease, so completely at home, of Gwen as she had seen her in the previous week. Each time Laura returned to Hudley Gwen appeared older and dowdier, and Laura felt a twinge of sadness on her behalf now.

A charming fair creature in white and gold brocade, the wife of a rival publisher, now rushed by, crying ecstatically: “Neville's tight!”

“Oh,
no!”
cried Laura's beautiful lady, detaching herself from the group excitedly. “Neville tight! Not really! Where?”

“He's on the floor over there,” cried the fair one, laughing. “Sitting against the wall. He's tight!”

“Neville's tight!” gurgled the dark lady happily. She rushed away, and could be heard here and there, eagerly passing on the glad news.

Presently, in the natural permutation of groups, Frederick strolled by, a yard or two away.

“Good evening, Frederick,” said Laura.

Frederick stopped and stared at her. “Why, Laura,” he began. “Is it Laura?” he queried, doubtful.

Laura was not surprised by his perplexity, for her complexion, her hair, her nails, her dress, were not at all the kind of thing he had been used to see on his young sister-in-law.

“Yes, it's Laura,” she said.

“You look very blooming,” said Frederick, squeezing himself into the corner beside her.. They were obliged to shout to make themselves heard above the din.

“Oh, I do bloom nowadays,” said Laura.

“What are you doing here?” enquired Frederick, taking a sausage.

“Do you want me to answer superficially or fundamentally?” said Laura.

“What? Oh, both,” said Frederick, twirling the sausage stick.

Without mentioning Geoffrey, Laura told him that she was at the moment dividing her time between London and Haworth, and explained how she came to know their host.

“And speaking fundamentally, what are you doing here?” said Frederick.

“Trying to See Life,” replied Laura. “As that phrase is understood when written with initial capitals.”

“Are you succeeding?” said Frederick with a look of grave interest.

“Not very well,” admitted Laura. “Are you?”

Frederick shook his head.

“The difficulty is,” shouted Laura in his ear, as the noise suddenly reached its climax: “We were brought up in the West Riding.”

“We were indeed,” agreed Frederick emphatically.

The party now began to thin, and Laura and Frederick found themselves strolling side by side towards the door.

“By the way,” said Frederick: “If you haven't been home lately, you may not know—Madeline has won a West Riding scholarship.”

“No!” exclaimed Laura, amazed. “But that's splendid, Frederick!”

“Yes, isn't it? She'll come up to town and live with me,” said Madeline's father.

“But that's delightful! I must say I never thought she had it in her,” said Laura. “When I was young, and studying at the Hudley Technical, to win a West Riding scholarship and study in London was my idea of Heaven.”

“Yes. It's perhaps just as well, too, that she's leaving Yorkshire,” said Frederick. “There seems to have been rather an unpleasant row about those caricatures.” Seeing that Laura looked interrogative, he explained; “She got into the Council Chamber somehow and drew the Town Councillors, didn't you hear? And one was published—a regular caricature, you know. There was quite a row.”

“Really? In Hudley?” said Laura, laughing.

“No; Ashworth, I believe,” said Frederick.

“Ashworth?” said Laura thoughtfully. She gave a slight shiver.

“Cold?” said Frederick.

“No—just a goose walking over my grave,” said Laura.

In the following year Madeline reached her majority, and was therefore due to take over the estate willed her by her grandfather.

In the case of Geoffrey this had been a sufficiently tedious and tiresome business, but Madeline's inheritance seemed productive of even more agitation, on account of some project about her Armistead and Hinchliffe shares which Laura at first did not understand. She did not, indeed, at first take much trouble to understand, feeling, in the moorland farm where she had temporarily established herself, that it was all very remote; but presently there came so many long, muddled, highly technical letters in her father's large distraught handwriting, so many perplexed letters from Grace and Frederick, so many cross little notes from Gwen, that she began to think it was her duty to go into the matter and find out what it was all about. She wrote to Geoffrey, who replied with a curt and cryptic telegram; eventually, in despair of ascertaining the facts otherwise, she went home for a week-end.

There the matter became clear. Geoffrey was proposing to buy his sister's Blackshaw shares at their market value as soon as they became hers. He would thus, in combination with his mother (thanks to her five hundred gas-engine shares), wield a larger number of votes than any other shareholder in the company except his grandfather; while on Mr. Armistead's death, on any equitable division of his property the controlling interest in the Mills would lie entirely with Geoffrey and Gwen. Since Gwen's devotion to her son was so complete, this meant: with Geoffrey. The transfer of shares was, however, by the company's articles of association to some extent under the control of the directors; thus the consent of Laura and Mr. Armistead was necessary to the proposed purchase, as well as the agreement of Madeline. Mr. Armistead was eager for his grandson to obtain the shares, but worried about the purchase money and where it was to be found.
Geoffrey was in a hurry—“she may get married,” he said crossly to Laura of his sister, “and then where should we be, with some Bolshevik fellow interfering at every turn?” The bank, which as Mr. Hinchliffe's executor had to turn over the estate to Madeline, was sure to be slow. Since Geoffrey was in a hurry, Gwen was impatient with every cause of delay, including Madeline, while Frederick declined to allow Madeline to be pressed. Altogether, in this apparently simple transaction the materials existed for a first-class family row, the temper of every member being also open to constant irritation from the network of formalities with which executors and lawyers were sure to encompass them. Laura therefore reluctantly decided that she must lend her assistance to the rapid conclusion of the affair.

She was not very well pleased by Geoffrey's urgency; she began indeed to think that there was something, as the phrase goes, “behind” it, and after some thought, told her nephew frankly that she intended to consult Ludo. Geoffrey replied irritably that she could consult everybody in the whole damn kingdom if she liked; anybody might think he was trying to rob his sister, instead of paying her good money for something of very doubtful value; he was giving her twelve-and-sixpence in the pound for shares of which the value was nil a very few years ago—another slump, and they wouldn't be worth the paper they were written on; Laura enquired where he proposed to obtain the “good money” he mentioned; Geoffrey replied that he meant partly to use the sum which his father had saved for him, but mainly to borrow the money from the bank, depositing the shares themselves as security. Laura sighed.

“How I hate these everlasting complications with the bank,” she said.

Geoffrey glanced at her. “If I bought you out too, Auntie Laura,” he hinted: “You wouldn't have to worry any more.”

“I shall never give up my shares in Blackshaw Mills,” snapped Laura.

Her nephew raised his eyebrows and exchanged a glance of humorous despair with Gwen.

Geoffrey's impatience; was exacerbated by the behaviour of his sister. Madeline wrote to him from Frederick's new address in Chelsea (in a singularly beautiful script, in drawing ink) that when she received her shares she would decide what to do with them—a sufficiently irritating position from which she declined to budge. She then, just before her birthday in July, departed to France for a two months' sketching tour. It was not possible to do anything in the matter till she returned; her address was uncertain, and it was not safe to forward letters of importance, wrote Frederick deprecatingly.

It seems so strange that the finances of Blackshaw Mills should be bandied about between those two children
, wrote Laura then impatiently to Frederick.

Each generation must be the artificer of its own social fabric
, replied Frederick:
it's interesting to watch the next generation picking up, so to speak, its shovel
.

It may be interesting in Chelsea, thought Laura when she received this, but in Hudley it's decidedly tiresome.

This southern valley, beneath the clear still sunshine of a September afternoon, was softly beautiful. The gently curving fields, divided by bushy green hedges, so different from the grim black West Riding walls, were carpeted by a smooth continuous herbage, so different from the coarse uneven West Riding grassland dotted with large browsing cows, their coats richly cream and russet, so different from the small wind-blown beasts who cropped a precarious living from the Hudley steeps. The mild hills were crowned with trees, tall, thickly leaved and spreading—so different from the sparse contorted thorns which bravely battled with the West Riding blasts. The stream which watered these green pastures was clear, smooth and placid. At a turn in the quietly winding road the Community buildings appeared, agreeable, tasteful, in the honey-coloured local stone, so different from the smoke-blackened millstone grit of the West Riding.
The kindly fruits of the earth that we may enjoy them
, thought Laura, dismounting from her car. She was glad that Ludo should have his home amid this kindly beauty, but at the same time found it uncomfortably characteristic of Ludo that he should reject his harsh native North and seek this gentler latitude. There were surely similar celibate Anglican communities in Yorkshire, if he had cared to choose one, reflected Laura; for herself, though she enjoyed this smiling countryside for an afternoon's drive, to live there would choke her; it was altogether too kind, too pretty,
too gracious; her northern nature would lack room to throw up its head and be alone.