The Balliols (40 page)

Lord Huntercoombe rose from the table's head, lifted his hand as it may be assumed Sulla did when he resigned his consulship, in a proud, brave recognition of the ultimately inevitable.

“In that case, let it be,” he said. “But I insist that she be a woman, not a girl. I insist that she shall be plain. I insist that she shall be more than plain. I insist that she shall be positively dowdy.”

The changes in his office were kept pace with by the changes in his home. For the first month of her marriage, after Victor had gone to France, Ruth had remained at Ilex, continuing her routine of canteen work. But before long she found the strain too great. She had resolved to have her baby in the country at Tavenham. The sooner she went down and got into the atmosphere of her new home, the better. There would be plenty of work for her to do down there: things to be organized, charities, relief committees. She wanted to be away from the smoke and noise of London, to breathe fresh air. Those at least were the reasons that she gave her friends. The real reason that she would have been shy of confessing even to Victor, was the belief that if she herself were to relax during those months into the atmosphere of Tavenham, the child she carried would be born feeling himself a part of the fields and hills he would inherit; that there would be a real kinship between him and the trees that drew their strength from that soil; the sheep and cattle that drew their sustenance from those meadows; since the same process had produced them both. So that all his life, no matter how far he might wander, what share he might take in the larger interests of the world, it would be with a true feeling of homecoming that he would see the broad avenue of chestnuts stretching behind the red-fronted, white-windowed house: a recognition that it was there that he belonged.

Ruth took the majority of her things with her when she went. All that was really personal: her pictures and her books, the ridiculous china objects: cats and flowers, that were arranged along the mantelpiece. The engraved quotation that is cut on the statue to Stevenson in San Francisco. With predatory eyes Francis watched the packing.

“I can have the room now as a workshop, surely?”

There seemed no very good reason why he should not. It was unlikely that Ruth would need the room again. So the bed and the wardrobe and the washstand were moved over into a corner, a long trestle table was set under the window, the carpet was taken up, the bookcase was sent down to Tavenham. Its place was taken by a
row of plain deal shelves, on which were set out an armoury of screws, saws, knives, hammers, chisels, pliers. Francis was only allowed to use such noisy instruments as hammers between ten and twelve in the morning and three and four in the afternoon, when Helen would be out of doors, and there was no one in the house likely to be disturbed. But even so, within a week so littered was the floor with chips and shavings that the housemaid had refused to be held responsible for its cleanliness.

“Once a month I'll give it a good scour, but to go in there morning after morning and tidy up what Master Francis'll ‘ave put back within the hour … no, m'm, that really is too much.”

Ruth would not have recognized the room as hers had she returned to it.

Not that Francis was to enjoy its disorder for very long. The time had come for him to leave the blue-capped school below the hill where for the last four years he had forgotten a greater part of the mathematics and practically all the history that he had learnt at his kindergarten in return for a knowledge of the classics so fragmentary that his common entrance paper barely entitled him to a place in the Shell at Fernhurst; than which there were only two forms lower. Francis was frankly puzzled by this performance.

“I thought I had done so well.”

“I'm afraid that the standard you set yourself as a result of your experiences as a blue cap is lower than the standard which the common entrance examiners expect,” his father explained to him. “As, however, you have more potential talent than the majority of those who passed in three forms above you, you should during your first few prize-givings form a pleasant nucleus for the collection of such books as are found in every gentleman's library, unread.”

On a warm September morning Balliol and Jane took Francis down to Fernhurst. Balliol had not been there for eight years; not since the day when he had broken his journey there on his way back from his father's funeral; when Hugh had been concerned about Stella's suffrage demonstrations and had asked with boyhood's self-centred belief in its own importance: “But surely if she realized she was making things difficult for me, she might go steady.” When the Chief had described Hugh, in the way that most fathers probably would prefer to have their sons described, as one of those who would not make history but would carry on the traditions and continuity of history; when he had returned to find Jane in that strange mood that had decided him to build a house in Hampstead. A great deal
had happened since that day. But Fernhurst had not altered. There were recruiting posters on the windows of the post office; on the hoardings by the masonic temple; a detachment of the Wessex yeomanry was camped in the castle grounds and khaki figures with reversed puttees and white lanyards were swaggering down Cheap Street. But the square golden tower of the abbey whose bells had tolled for soldiers fallen through the wars of seven centuries, had rung their tributes to the outcome of a hundred battles, absorbed and subdued such externalities to itself, directing and controlling its cloistered life.

As he walked across the courts, past the lindens, to the drive, leading to the headmaster's house, it seemed to Balliol that not a day had passed since he had walked there for the first time with Hugh. Nor did the headmaster seem any different as he came into his drawing-room, out of the book-lined study, to welcome a new pupil. He was a little greyer, the slope of his shoulders was possibly more marked. His slow speech pointed the same contrast between the scholastic tranquillity of the study he had just left and the busy mechanized civilization for which the boys under his care were trained. Faces might change, but the atmosphere was constant; the tradition of scholarship informing and surviving history.

On the first day of term a headmaster has not much time to bestow upon a parent. The Balliols limited their stay to fifteen minutes; passed for the most part in the conventionalities of conversation; war talk for the most part: a weighing of rumours and probabilities, where the Press was censored, where all news was second-hand, where no one knew what he could believe, where faith in the country's leaders had begun to ebb, where suspicion and distrust had taken the place of gladly and proudly given service. Such conversation as was being made right through the country in clubs, offices, railway trains: wherever men met and talked.

“And Hugh,” the headmaster asked, “what news have you of him?”

There was very little news. He was a lieutenant now, expecting a captaincy before long, impatient at being kept in England; fretting, as were ten thousand other officers who had enlisted, to fight in Flanders, not to train drafts in Nottingham, listen to lectures on musketry at Hythe, prepare on the East Coast defences that one high-powered shell from a man-of-war would scatter to powdered sand.

“Not gone to France, then?” said the chief. “You're lucky. My boy's been there four months. One gets used to it. One gets
used to everything. But I never see a telegraph boy turn out of Cheap Street towards the school without wondering whether he's got that telegram for me.”

The Balliols' train for London left shortly after five. At about the time that the train from London by which the greater number of the boys travelled back to school arrived. From the opposite platform they watched the swarm of boys in the bright ties and bowler hats that would in an hour or so be exchanged for black poplin and a wide-brimmed straw, hurry over the bridge in a laughing, chattering stream. Jane's eyes followed them with a puzzled, sad misgiving. “They all look so big,” she said.

It was late when they returned. A cold supper had been laid out for them. It was the parlourmaid's night out. The cook had a headache and had gone to bed. The nurse who, much against her will, with a bad grace and in return for a substantial increase, had been cajoled into taking her share of housework (“Now, mind you, it's only for the duration!”) was reading in the nursery. The house seemed very empty. They ate their meal, practically in silence. As they rose from the chairs, he put his arm round her shoulder. She did not exactly move away, but she seemed to retreat, drawing herself closer to avoid his touch. He dropped his hand.

As he climbed the stairs, to change into the velvet smoking-jacket that he put on every evening after dinner, he checked his step, as though the wall of the long corridor in front of him had become transparent; and he could see into that long succession of empty rooms. Lucy's, Hugh's, Ruth's, Francis's. One by one they had gone, the four people for whom he had built this house; whose tastes and privileges he had in mind, thinking “This'll be Hugh's room. Then Lucy and Ruth will want a room of their own where they can write and talk and see their friends. Then Francis. He'll need a whole nursery.” He had pictured Ilex as his children's home. And now.…

There was no need for him to open the doors to recreate the blank interiors. Lucy's, still kept on more or less as she had left it. It served as a spare room now. The Liberty curtains she had insisted on, the William Morris wall-paper with its extravagant pattern that had then seemed melancholy and now seemed oddly out of date, since the post-impressionists had imposed a new idiom on decoration. He wondered whether she would think it old-fashioned now, or whether her taste had remained static in a country that had never seen Cézanne.
It would be many months anyhow before she saw it. Her letters were always in the same key “I wish I could come home. But how can I run the risk of bringing my children back, with all that danger of mines and submarines? And I can't leave them. Besides, there's Stephen. He's got so much to do that the Government wouldn't think of letting him enlist; of course he's dying to. Though, as he says, being what is practically a government official in a place like Ipoh is much more important than being just a platoon officer in France. Not, of course, that he'd remain a platoon officer for long. But he can't possibly get away. And he does need me, so you see, dear father.…”

No, it would be many moons before she saw again that elaborately traced foliage and it would be many moons and much would have needed to have happened before Hugh regarded as more than a kind of lumber loft for valises and suitcases, the carefully planned bed-sitting-room, with its writing-desk, heavy leathered arm-chairs, its photographs of schools and college groups, with tasselled caps hung from the corners, inscribed oar above the mantelpiece, low divan bed that by day concealed its nature beneath a pile of cushions, the fire-guard with cushioned fender. “What I believe women designate as a den,” as Balliol put it.

Ilex was a place that Hugh made use of. It was not in any sense of the word an axle round which his life revolved. And it was as that that he had pictured Ilex; for Hugh and for his other children. A place where they would lead their personal lives, seeing their friends, following their interests, until the time should come for them to marry and make homes of their own. Already, in eight years, they had come each in their separate way to feel no longer any real need of Ilex. The only one whose life was completely bounded by its walls was Helen, whose existence had been unforeseen when those walls were built. The only light along the corridor came from the nursery. The nurse had converted it, now that Francis had relatively adult tastes, into a personal sitting-room. The corner where Francis had spread out his trains at that first party was so set apart from the rest of the room with an arm-chair, a writing-table, a sewing machine, as almost to be a room of its own, with the remainder left for Helen and her toys.

“If it weren't for Helen, Jane and I might just as well be living in a small service flat. In many ways it would be more convenient.”

He came down into the drawing-room to find Jane standing before the fire-place, one foot raised upon the fender, an arm lying along the
mantelpiece, her head drooped forward. Something in her pose reminded him of the way she had stood before the fire-place at that long-ago dinner party in Easton Square, when she had met Roy Rickman for the first time; when she had turned round and said in her quiet, but definite voice:

“Edward, I don't want to go on living here any longer.”

He had the curious feeling that he was relieving something that had already happened, as she turned round now with the same intent, resolved expression on her face, and in her voice was the same quiet, determined tone.

“Edward, I can't stand it now that Francis has gone. I just can't sit here doing nothing. I'm going to see Stella. She's sure to be able to find something for me to do.”

Balliol made no attempt at opposition. It seemed a very sensible thing for her to do. It was odd, though, the quiet, unobtrusive way in which Jane would come to decisions, clearly important to herself; the result obviously of a mental crisis, of which she had shown on symptoms. Where other women would be nervous, fretful, irritable for days as a prelude to some suddenly blurted out, “Of course I know you'll not care to listen to what I've got to say, but at the same time …” Jane calmly thought out her problem, then stated her conclusion. And you realized that there was a definite finality about her conclusions: that what appeared a caprice, the outcome of a mood, was on the contrary a logically reached decision.

It was curious, too, the way in which one after another his womenfolk had turned for guidance to his sister. First Lucy, then Ruth, now Jane. He remembered how anxious his father had been that Stella should marry; how Jane and he had tried to find beaux for her, had all three of them visualized success and happiness in terms of marriage. They had not realized that there were women to whom marriage would be a hindrance. Stella would never have done what she had done if she had had the responsibilities of a house and children.