The Balliols (75 page)

No, it isn't what we meant. I wonder if I'm to blame. If I haven't tried enough. If when I saw him going, I let him go. Standing on my dignity, thinking if I'm not enough for him, that's his look out, I'm not running after anyone. Perhaps I was wrong there. Perhaps I ought to do something. It isn't too late. Before we drift right apart; before we become just friends. If we went
away together, just ourselves. I don't see why we couldn't. It'll be worth trying.

Thought Victor: “I wonder what's going to happen to the old boy now. I don't suppose he'll want to stay on in the business now that he hasn't a son to leave it to. It's not the kind of thing that would appeal to Francis, particularly after that row. Best to make a clean cut of it all, I'd say the best thing to do was to buy him out. I'll see Smollett. I don't believe in small, personal businesses. I'm for the chain store system. There's a lot of money about just now. I know where a good deal of it's to be found. One of these big warehouse firms would be glad to buy us out. We could be useful to them as a shop window, in a way that we can't be to ourselves. It's worth considering. I expect the old boy'll be glad to have nothing to worry over for a while.”

“I'll be head of the family now,” thought Francis. It was an impressive thought, for one who had played second fiddle all his life. It gave him a sense of responsibility, importance. “I must take life seriously; work; become someone that the rest of the family can look up to; stop chasing girls. I ought to leave the Sanction Office. It's fun up there. But it's the buyers who really count. I'll go and see Malcolm. I'll ask him what he thinks. I've got to start taking life seriously.”

“Whosoever believeth shall live, though he die, and whosoever liveth and believeth in Him shall not die eternally.”

“Yes, and that's true,” thought Jane. “I know. These others don't know for certain. But I do. I've been in communion with the other side. I'll be able to tell him now. I've always wanted to. I've hated keeping it from my own husband but he'd have laughed at me. ‘Silly little spiritualist' he'd have said. And to begin with I was shy. I wasn't certain myself. But I was so unhappy. The world seemed soulless. When Francis was taken away from me and sent to school, I thought if there is no second life to remedy the misery of this, then it isn't worth while living. I'd rather be dead. I had to find out. That's why I told him I was going to ask Stella to find me war work. So that I should have the time to find out for myself. So that I needn't account for my movements. So that I could go to the people who could help me. And then when they had convinced me, when I really knew, when I had been in communion with the other side, I wanted to tell him then. But I felt he'd laugh at me.
He wouldn't believe. And there was no one who he really wanted to get in touch with. No one he missed. But now that his son's dead, that's different. He'll want to know. I'll be able to show him that Hugh's only a little way away; that we can still talk to him; that we shall soon join our son; that there is no death; that there is only change.”

The slow voice of the priest intoned his final sentences.

“The things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.”

The last prayer was read. The group of friends and relations dispersed. A couple of cars were waiting to take the actual members of the family back to Ilex. “I wonder what they'll do with their house now,” thought Stella. “It's no use to them. It's far too big. It costs a lot to run. They'd be glad to have it taken off their hands. I wonder if I couldn't do something about that. The King's Cross Nursing Home are looking for a house in Hampstead. It'd be the kind of house they want. And I've got that committee in my pocket. I really don't see why not.”

Two months later, for a day and a half, the southern side of the North End Road was blocked with vans.

In a way, with the death of Hugh, the story of the Balliols ends, or at least that part of their story which had Ilex for its background which had begun with that walk from Hendon on an April day up a hillside unscarred by villas. A weaving together of threads had started then. Hugh's death started their unwinding. It was not simply, that Stella arranged for the sale of Ilex, that Victor planned the amalgamation of Peel & Hardy with one of the larger shippers. The change was a more subtle one than that. For each of the main figures in the Balliol Chronicle that mental stocktaking at the graveside was a landmark; was the calling of a halt to that course of thoughts and acts that had run contiguous with the continuous stream of narrative that had been their life. For each of them something ended and something started then. It was not exactly the more essential part of themselves that ended, but it was that part of them which was strictly Balliol, which was linked with their father and their mother. The mental stocktaking that demanded a remodelling of their lives, set them on roads separate and their own; severed them from their first currents. As far as it is possible to discern in life any climatic moments except birth and death, which are themselves, seen from a certain angle, no more than pauses in a stream of change, that hour of speculation by a grave did mark a climax.

For myself the years that followed on Hugh's death were a time of travel. I was in London little and for short times. But it is often easier to get a clear picture of a friend that one sees once every eighteen months, than the friend that one meets every other day. One is conscious of change and contrast, when the snapshot of to-day can be set beside the snapshot of yesteryear. You cannot tell how the person you see every day is altering.

It was in a succession of snapshots that I watched the Balliols during the years which bridged with an unreal prosperity the crises of the war with the crises of currency collapse. For old Balliol they were happy years. The sale of Ilex and the sale of Peel & Hardy left him with a sufficient income to satisfy needs that had grown modest. He took a service flat near Baker Street; the most central
point in London, he maintained. He walked every morning to his club in Piccadilly. He arrived there at noon; for half an hour he would read the weeklies. He would then order a glass of sherry and engage a fellow member in conversation. He breakfasted lightly, so lunched amply. It was half past three before he would stir from his post-prandial doze. The evening papers would be in the club. A cup of tea at four. The card room till half past six. He invariably dined at home.

The atmosphere of his home was pleasanter than it had been for a long time. He liked living in a service flat: no stairs; and the meals were better. Jane's vagueness had resulted in a corresponding vagueness in her staff. His relations with Jane were easier now. Her confession about spiritualism had, to his surprise, proved singularly soothing to his pride. It allowed him to survey his past with a more dignified complacence. Jane too appeared relieved to have “got it off her mind.” She had not persuaded him to attend a séance. No. He thought it was a mistake to meddle with that kind of thing. You didn't know where it would lead you. One should live in this world while one had to, and not bother about the next world till one reached it. All the same, the man who said there was nothing in spiritualism was prejudiced: a fool. You might just as well try and argue away the miracles at Lourdes.

For the summer he takes rooms in Sandwich. The links are ntolerably crowded. But if you start from the first tee at Prince's at about twelve, you can be certain of a quiet round. In the summer he breakfasts amply, misses lunch, and eats a tea that would ruin his dinner, were his dinner in seaside rooms capable of being spoilt. He enjoys his golf as much as ever. He rarely breaks a hundred nowadays. Even on a windless day he takes wood at the short third; and even with wood and a wind behind him he never carries the cross bunker at the fifth. But he usually gets down from the edge of the green in two. The attempts of the English Golf Union to introduce a standard scratch score for every course has caused him the liveliest pleasure. His chief interest as a newcomer to any course is the opportunity it provides for a mathematical computation of its strict par figure. No one talks more scornfully from a club arm-chair about “this Bogey nonsense.”

Sometimes his granddaughter, Lucy's Jane, accompanies him round Prince's. His yearly Christmas present to her is an associate membership. She is so like what Lucy was at her age, Balliol has himself so little altered, that, seeing them together, one feels that the clock has been put back twenty years. One would think it dull for her.
But really it is rather a relief to get away with her grandparents. Her mother has become exceedingly strict. She is taking Hugh's example to heart. She had resolved to be a mid-Victorian matron. Her husband, now on the committee of the Oriental Club, thoroughly applauds her sentiments. Discipline: that's what the younger generation needs. He considers that motor cars are to blame. He would refuse a licence to any unmarried woman under twenty-five.

Shortly after Hugh's death Ruth and Victor went abroad together for a month's holiday alone. They have made a point ever since of taking two short holidays together every year. It's the only chance they get of seeing one another, they maintain. In London, whenever they are at a party, entertaining or being entertained, there is always at least a half-table's length between them. Business still takes him to the North and Midlands. But golf less frequently demands his attendance at Le Touquet tournaments. He has been heard to assert that backing plays is a mug's game.

Francis, as he had promised himself, sought Malcolm's advice on the day following Hugh's funeral.

“I'm enjoying myself all right at Irongate. But I'm not getting anywhere. I think I'd better come across to the main building.”

“That's what little Malcolm told you four years ago.”

“I am going to work now. I'm going to take life seriously,” he had vowed. To a certain extent he did. He was promoted, quickly. As a buyer he had to make fairly frequent trips across the Channel. His superiors were satisfied. But they were puzzled by, and convinced that he was mistaken in, his assertion that Brussels and not Paris was the European centre of the textile trade. They were unaware that three days a week a scented envelope bearing a Belgian postmark lay beside Francis's breakfast tray.

Returning to London after absences of four, six, eleven months, I saw the Balliols in clearer outline than I had when as a Londoner I was seeing or hearing about them every other week. I saw them too, as a result of my travelling, in more clear perspective.

The tourist-traveller who spends six weeks in one island and three months in another may not learn a great deal about the places that he visits but he does learn a great deal about the country that he has left and to which he will later on return. He sees problems that puzzled him in his own country, presented on a smaller scale and consequently simplified. The six months that I spent in the West Indies clarified for me those processes of change which determined the fortunes of the Balliols and which they themselves so markedly exemplified.

The story of the West Indies can be told in a few words. There were in the first place the large plantations, for the most part of sugar cane, worked by slaves; the owners lived in large stone-built houses, in an atmosphere of feudal grandeur. Such towns as there were consisted of warehouses and dramshops, where the middlemen, the lawyers, the ship-chandlers, the petty traders made their middleman's profit from merchantmen and planters. The extremes of luxury and poverty existed side by side. The phrase “rich as a Creole” was in household use. Little of that grandeur exists to-day; the rich planters impoverished their estates by spending the profits in Europe; the opening of other sugar markets reduced their intrinsic value. A mulatto class sprang up. The big estates went bankrupt. They were sold and split up among small owners. As the world price of sugar fell the small owners could no longer afford to keep up their plantations. They mortgaged them to the middlemen on the coast. Mulatto overseers were put in charge. Very often mulattos bought the estates that were put up for auction. A point was reached when the estate that could no longer support a white man's standard, could support a mulatto's whose plane was lower. No one could afford to maintain the large stone houses. They were deserted. The roofs fell in, the walls crumbled, they were used as stables. As the price of sugar fell the mulattos in their turn mortgaged their estates; till gradually the administration passed from the plantation to the coast; till the island was practically owned by the large shipping companies; by vested interests; till the towns, instead of the country, became the centre of comfort, breeding, ease.

For that process of change there was to be found a close parallel in the story of the Balliols. There was the original estate in Devonshire that no longer sufficed for Balliol. There was the migration to the cities; whose importance increased as the power of the land diminished; there was the business of Peel & Hardy large enough to suffice for Balliol but not large enough for his family; for Hugh and Francis. Yet large enough to offer scope to the enterprise of a man like Smollett, the English equivalent for the mulatto Creole. In Victor Tavenham there was an equivalent for the large feudal estate undermined by absenteeism; by urban extravagance; by mortgages that had grown heavier as the world price of commodities dropped. The
large houses that in the West Indies became derelict ruins, in England became schools, or country clubs, or the week-end cottages of industrial millionaires. In every walk of life there was the tendency of the big business to absorb the small; for power to pass from the land to the cities; from the ploughshare to the desk and telephone; from manual labour to the machine.

In the West Indies the process of change that is altering the nature of English life is set out simply; so that one can see what has happened; what is happening; what is likely to happen. My months in the West Indies showed me the Balliols in more clear perspective.