The Balliols (16 page)

From the flush in her cheeks he knew which piece of news interested her the most.

“What have you arranged for Roy?”

“I'm making him our chief foreign representative.”

“Does that mean he'll have to travel?”

“He'll be in the Far East most of the time.”

“In the Far East… then, that'll mean——” She paused; a pensive, abstracted expression on her features. “Oh, but that's splendid, that's the best thing that could possibly have happened to him. I think it's fine for him. And it's lovely about the house. I'm so excited. We'll have Liberty curtains in the drawing-room
and a Morris wallpaper, and no pictures. Yes, and we'll have a four-poster bed. No, we won't. We'll have a very low, wide bed, with a canopy above, and curtains, silk curtains; blue. We'll have an amusing nursery, with the ceiling blue, like the sky, and with stars all over it. It will be fun. I shall enjoy myself. I
am
glad. It's the best thing that could have happened for him.”

The next weeks were busy ones for Edward Balliol. At the office there was much detail to be settled. The enlargement of the tobacco department was proving a larger problem than he had fancied. The new man, Smollett, was a far more independent person than he had imagined: not by any means the shop assistant. Roy Rickman's itinerary demanded supervision. At home there was the excitement of house-building; the discussion of plans with architects and surveyors. There were decorators' estimates; all the legal flummery of unencumbered conveyancing. Each day brought some fresh problem. There were frequent interviews; frequent visits to the Heath to examine the new site. Night after night Jane would spread a pile of patterns in front of her on the table. As the days passed what had been started as a distraction for Jane became for him an engrossing object. This house would be the first thing in his life to be his very own. Up to now he had shared his possessions with other people. There had been his home, the house that his grandfathers had handed on to him. There had been the bachelor rooms in London, rented like a school study on a yearly lease. There had been his London house, taken first of all on a seven years' lease and renewed year by year so that now he found himself able to be rid of it with three months' notice. He had always lived in other people's atmospheres. “We have gone back to Nomad life,” he used to say. “We travel from flat to flat with our luggage in vans. We pitch our tents and then move on.” That was how it had always been before. It was different now. He was not inheriting a tradition. He was creating one. He was building out of his own taste in the manner of his time. This house would be his own; was something to which people could look two centuries hence; of which they could say: “This was the way in which at the beginning of the twentieth century a man of education and some means chose to live.” He would have set a stamp, he would have expressed his own individuality in the idiom of his day. He was starting a tradition, founding a family and a line. Such a feeling as came to innumerable other Londoners while village after village became a suburb; while the tide of Greater London swept outwards through Essex, Kent and Surrey.

His house absorbed him. Once or twice Roy came to dinner; once or twice Roy joined them in expeditions to look over the new house. Now and again, when he was at his office, Roy came to tea, or to take Jane walks or to a matinée. He did not worry. There was a date marked upon a calendar. That was proof of safety. Nothing that mattered could happen before then. Nothing could happen after it. He was content to let the situation slide.

He felt no jealousy. His was not a jealous nature. And besides, it was with a feeling of some complacence that he viewed his handling of the situation. If he felt any personal emotion it was a kind of pity; born out of the memory of himself as an undergraduate, when he had sat through long hours of unavowed adoration at the feet of a woman in the middle thirties. She was married, the mother of children, just as Jane was. The husband had been a hard-riding, hard-drinking, wind-bitten country squire—noisy, hearty, red-faced. The hail-fellow-well-met type; whose fist is as ready to shake another man's as black his eye. He had treated Balliol as a child; hospitable and welcoming with him. “Well, young man, tell me what they're saying at Oxford about this new fast bowler.” Balliol had respected him; had liked him; but had wondered what his wife could see in him. She was so delicate, so bird-like; her husband was so rough. Through a long summer he had sat at her feet; then the long vac. had ended. He had written verses to her during the misty autumn. But when he came back at Christmas everything seemed different. They had met once or twice; at dances, at dinner parties; but it had not been the same, indoors, with the bright lights, the noise, the music. The moments of easy intimacy never returned. He had been very Byronic about it all; had written a long ode about tombs and graveyards; on the whole, had rather relished his melancholy. Later he had been inclined to laugh at it; the folly of youth. But now, over a greater distance, he remembered what he had truly felt; that whatever might have happened afterwards, that summer had been a lovely idyll.

Were Jane and Roy living through such an idyll now? They might well be. Sometimes he was conscious of an atmosphere between them rather like that of twilight; a kind of luminous hush. On one afternoon in particular, when they had driven out together, the three of them, to look at the new house, now rising through the scaffolding to its second story. There had not been a great deal to see. It was a Saturday; the workmen were away. It was hot, and he felt sleepy. “Let's go up to the Park,” he said.

They had arranged their chairs in the shadow of a tree. He
had sat on the outside. Jane had turned away from him towards Roy. The murmur of their talk, mingling with the innumerable soft sounds of a summer day, had a soothing effect. He leant his head back against the woodwork of the chair; the sunlight was warm upon his face. He tilted his straw hat forward to shade his eyes. His eyelids grew heavy.

When he awoke there was no murmur of talk beside him. He turned his head. The two chairs were empty. A glance at his watch told him that he had been asleep for half an hour. I must have snored and driven them away. But he knew very well it was not that.

Their last afternoon together, after all. They were probably walking in the rose garden. It was at its loveliest now. How often, during the torrid tropic months, Rickman's memory would revisit it. What were they talking of? Of themselves? He doubted it. You could dispense with self-analysis when you were in love; in their way, anyhow. They were probably talking of the children, of the weather, of a new book, a new play, the political issues. Anyone overhearing them would fancy that they were making conversation. They wouldn't be. Beneath that façade of words their thoughts would hold communication. He remembered all that vaguely, as one recalls a landscape that one has known a long time ago. It was very long since he had been in love. He could recall the “When and Where,” but not the “How and What”; the way he had felt, not the actual feeling. He could not even remember if it was happiness or sadness they were sharing. There were certain moods that he had heard described as “happy-sad.” He did not know whether he should be sorry for them, or envious.

Then he saw them. Coming across the lawn towards him. They were not talking. She was looking down, trailing her parasol. There was a look on her face that he had not seen for fifteen years.

They were sorry for one another. But he envied them.

The Balliols' house was practically finished when I left home in September for my first term at a preparatory school. The roof was up; the scaffolding was down; the heaps of cement and mortar had been cleared away; a gravel path ran up to the front door; the garden was a brown flat stretch but certain lifted mounds of earth indicated the projected pattern of flower-bed and lawn. Instead of the wooden fencing along which small boys ran their sticks with a hideous clatter, a low wall with iron chain-linked palings faced the road. Most suburban houses of the period were gable-roofed, rough-cast, bow-windowed; but Balliol had followed a Queen Anne model. It was a two-storied, low-roofed house: very red and white; with four tall rectangular windows on each side of the high white portico. It was a very impressive residence; but its uncurtained windows gave it a staring, carcase-like appearance. It was not yet alive. I was very curious to see what it would be like by Christmas.

My letters home during that Christmas term were interspersed with questions about the house; most of the letters that I received from my parents contained some reference to it. It was to be called Ilex: a name that appealed to me but puzzled me; till I had it explained that Ilex was the Latin for Holm Oak. I thought it an elaborate and rather silly pun. But I feel now that its obscure playing on surburban nomenclature was very typical of Balliol; like his conversational use of inverted commas—”as the inhabitants of Hampstead would christen it.”

The word “ILEX” was set on the front gate early in October. Before the November rains had turned the unseeded lawn into a morass, a row of vans had blocked the south side of the North End Road. For half a week a team of white-overalled workmen had staggered beneath beds, tables, chairs, pictures, carpets. During the holidays there was to be a house-warming, I was told; with a children's party on New Year's Eve.

For several reasons that party has stood out very clearly in my memory. It was the first time that I had seen from the inside the house that had employed so much of my curiosity. It was the first
time that I had seen the Balliols as a family; instead of as isolated units, come from Easton Square to inspect the progress of the house. And since I had sprained my ankle and was unable to dance, I was a spectator through the whole proceedings.

There were a hundred children there in all. There were Hugh's friends and there were Francis's; they were of all ages from sixteen to six. It was the kind of party that was given for children in those days. There was dancing, there was a conjuror, there were competitions, there was a Santa Claus. No child was allowed to win more than one prize; there were so many prizes that it was difficult for any child to avoid winning something. The party wandered over two floors, and through three rooms. There was the large downstairs room, which ran the entire length of the house, and whose measurements I had so excitedly stepped out in the preceding spring. It was a high, half-panelled room; a large imitation Adam fireplace in the centre; on either side of the fireplace bookshelves ran to the ceiling; an oval portrait of an eighteenth-century ancestor hung above the mantelpiece. On the opposite walls were four further portraits, in dull gold frames: dark, sombre pictures of young bare-shouldered women with ringlets hanging low upon their necks. From the ceiling hung two vast cut-glass candelabra. At the far end of the room were French windows, opening on to a balconied veranda. Red damask curtains fell from the ceiling in heaving glittering folds. Under the windows that faced the road was a low window seat.

It was here that, for my ankle's sake, I rested during the little time that I was in this room. The older children were here for the most part. It was the ballroom. Carpets had been swept away; along the mantelpiece a row of programmes dangled their pencils on green and scarlet tassels. There was a variety of dances. There were polkas, valses, lancers, Highland schottisches, the barn dance, with Sir Roger de Coverley last upon the list.

Lucy was in supervision of this room. She had invited none of her friends, and insisted on being classed as a grown-up. She had lengthened her skirt, and had tried to persuade her mother to let her put her hair up. This had not been permitted. She had, however, been allowed to put pads above her forehead, and the puffed appearance that they gave her, separated her far more than a “bun” would have done from the dapper young preparatory-school men in Eton jackets and white waistcoats, their hair carefully brushed back off damp foreheads, who revolved clumsily, boisterously, stiffly, as their spirit moved them, round the uncouthly plump maidens whose ribboned pigtails flapped
against wide silk sashes. As Lucy looked after the children who were without partners, and checked those who were dancing too obstreperously, her face wore a serious graciousness that set her apart from the carefree revel she directed.

On the right of the hall opposite the large dancing-room, was the dining-room, where the tea was spread. For children between six and ten the tea is the chief incident in a party. Intense curiosity was felt as to the exact nature of the preparations that we could hear proceeding behind the door. Would there, or would there not be ices? It was winter, but even in the winter one had ices sometimes. There was much whispering and mutual daring among the brighter of the younger spirits. “I dare you to go down there and look!” “Fains I going to see!” One child did have the temerity to open the door, but Lucy from the ballroom had observed him. “No, Johnnie, that's the tea-room. We'll be going in there afterwards. I expect you're looking for the nursery: that's upstairs.”

He wasn't. But he went.

The rooms to which he was consigned were Francis's nursery, and the girls' room: a smallish boudoir kind of place where Ruth and Lucy kept their books and photographs; where they read, wrote their letters, prepared their homework, exchanged confidences. It had a cosy air; with its two large arm-chairs, its chesterfield, the patchwork screen on which in childhood they had plastered the odd assortment of pictures, newspaper headlines, photographs of soldiers, actors, royalties that represented their varying and maturing tastes; the high bookshelves in which such early favourites as the story of
Brer Rabbit
, the
Violet Fairy Book
, the
Child's History of England
, were jumbled side by side with school primers, French and German readers and the novels of Florence Barclay. It was a time when embellished quotation, when scriptural and poetic admonitions were fashionable. Over the mantelpiece on a tall gilt-edged card was engraved the passage that on a distant, long to be remembered day I was to read inscribed on the statue to Stevenson in San Francisco: