The Balliols (80 page)

“It's over,” she thought, “over. We couldn't feel the same again about each other. We aren't the people that we thought we were.”

Through a mist she heard him whisper: ‘Fane, I must get back. I'm through.” Vaguely, as if it were a long way off, she heard the soft answer: “Yes, of course, my dear, at once,” with all that answer implied of willing acceptance of a lot; through a mist she saw the woman she had thought of as old, lead the man who had been the incarnation of youth towards the door.

“It's over,” she thought, “over.”

At the lodge at Farleigh Helen Balliol looked out over the dark sombre moor. She had come to the Eastpoint to make her choice between three alternatives. She had had that choice made for her. That swollen puffy face had been her answer. Whatever she could do without, health she must have: Health and Youth. And there was only one way that you could give yourself to youth: wholeheartedly.

“I'd be risking less with Kenneth; than with Roy: and anyhow what do risks matter? It's all right playing for safety when you're old; when you're Roy's age; but not at mine; not at Kenneth's: I know what I want now.”

It is as dangerous as it is tempting to search for symbols: to say of a particular episode or person: this typifies a generation. But in the seriousness with which Helen Balliol contrasted her three alternatives; in the nature of the choice that was presented her, and the manner of its presentation, in her denial of the standards by which her immediate predecessors had run their lives, her readiness to turn for guidance to a generation whose standards those predecessors had discarded, is typified, if looked at from a certain angle, the attempt of a generation to combine points of view that had seemed irreconcilable, as though it were the function of that generation to bridge the conflict between Georgian and late Victorian England; while in her final choice is typified the resolve to accept the risks of her own day and hour; rather than those of an earlier period.

Helen Balliol was a Victorian stone in a Georgian setting. The convocation to a christening a year later was the fitting corollary to a marriage undertaken in that spirit.

The letters of invitation contained very precise information as to the best ways of getting to the party by tube, bus, and car. The information was not superfluous. The letter-paper was headed Rudolph Circus. And Rudolph Circus is the centre of one of the most crowded slum districts in north London. It is, however, within a few minutes' walk of St. Pancras. It was designed architecturally for the fortunes of an ample period. The proportions of the houses and the rooms are pleasantly classic. Owing to the neighbouring destitution, Helen was able to acquire for thirty shillings a week a two-floored maisonette for which in Bloomsbury she would have paid seven guineas.

Nor when you were once inside the house could you see any advantage to be had from Bloomsbury. The approach was slatternly and noisy. That Helen did not contest. But if one had to reside economically, it was better in her opinion to economize in dignity of approach than in floor space, light and air. The interior, admittedly, was charming; particularly in the winter, when the windows were closed, the curtains drawn, and the noise and savour of the street shut out.

The christening, however, took place on a warm September afternoon. The sitting-room was crowded; the windows were of necessity wide open. The inhabitants of Rudolph Circus who had never before been favoured with the spectacle of long low cars depositing silk-hatted figures on their pavement, had collected their neighbours to form a loquacious, gesticulating group outside. There was a great deal of noise inside the room. There was a great deal of noise coming from the street. Sir Stephen Chambers looked about him with manifest alarm. He kept very close to Lucy as though she was in danger of being kidnapped. “As Huntercoombe's not here, I suppose I ought to propose the baby's health. I wonder how soon I can decently get away.”

His father-in-law, on the other hand, was more interested in what was happening outside than what was happening inside the room. He was standing by the window, surveying with his bland, indifferent interest the eager and chattering infants. “A very interesting group of natives.
The study of their tribal customs would well repay the anthropologist.”

Francis on the other hand was concentrating his attentions on the party. He was acting as secondary host. That is to say as barman. The champagne, the remnants of a wedding present from the directors of the reconstituted Peel & Hardy was admirable. His face was flushed, accentuating a slight puffiness of cheek. He had given up football the previous year and was growing fat. His work at Selfridge's was still giving satisfaction, though his immediate superiors had been puzzled by his recent decision that Amsterdam not Brussels was the real centre of the textile trade. His visits to Amsterdam were, however, less frequent than his trips to Brussels had been. Gallantry had in part lost its savour for him. He had asked himself whether he had ever really loved. He was nearly thirty. He was in the mood to fall or to imagine himself seriously in love. A great deal indeed depended on the type of woman by whom he was next attracted. He was one of those men, one of a smaller minority than is recognized, whose life is so centred around women, that they can at a crucial point be made or broken by a love affair. If there was waiting for Francis the kind of marriage that subsides into a sympathetic comradeship, his life would continue on an even course of routine promotion. He was capable on the other hand of torpedoing his prospects for a married woman. While again the demands and caprices of a flibbertigibbet might tantalize, exasperate his ambition into genuine achievement. It was a toss up. One way or another the outcome lay hidden in the next five years.

Victor was not there. He had been unable to cancel an important board meeting at Hull. He was working at full pressure. The Wall Street panic had hit him badly. One evening he had returned from the city with a worried but animated expression on his face. He had tossed his paper on to the table with a laugh. “There are times when I'm pretty glad I've got a wife like you,” he had said to Ruth. “Now what am I to take that to mean?” “Oh, you know: a wife that stands by a man when his luck's down. That doesn't think about herself. That says ‘So that's how it is. We'll have to do the best we can about it.'” “Are things bad?” she had asked him. He had nodded. “As bad as they could be. I don't know how much we'll be able to salvage, but it means pretty well starting at the bottom.” It would mean, among other things, moving into a smaller house. But as they made their plans that evening there was an eager excited look on Victor's face. What Hugh had called his “Yarborough look.” The look that came when he picked up a bad hand; that had come into
his face at that first party when he had met Ruth. He was only really happy when the odds against him were over five to one.

Stella, too, was absent. She was in Parliament, as a National Conservative. Cabinet rank was prophesied for her. Her energy was as tireless as ever. She had no private life. Her friends were those with whom her social and political activities brought her into contact. The only way to get to know her was to serve on a committee with her. She had sent, however, an extremely elegant mug to grace the christening.

For me the party had a quality not exactly of wistfulness but of finality. Half of those I had expected to meet there were away. Three-quarters of those who were there I did not know. The story of the Balliols, as I had known it, was at an end. A number of new stories were beginning. But the story that had started with Edward Balliol's slow climbing of the North End Road on an April afternoon: that was finished.

Ruth, too, I fancied, was oppressed by a like feeling. As soon as the baby's health had been proposed, she made a sign to me.

“Shall we slip away?” she whispered. “I've got my car below.”

It was a grey two-seater Hotchkiss; a compact and practical kind of car.

“Where would you like to be dropped?” she asked.

Somewhere near Marble Arch, I told her. I was going to my club in Brook Street. She asked me if I were in any hurry. I shook my head.

“Then do you mind if we go over the Heath. I don't know if you've heard, but they're pulling Ilex down and making a block of flats there. It would be a good day to take a last look at it.”

As she bent forward to turn the key of the car, I took a steady, sideways look at her. It was twenty-three years since I had seen her for the first time. She had been fourteen then. Yet I felt that the girl who had pressed her toes against the ceiling to see how much weight lath and plaster would resist, was the same person who was sitting beside me now. Through so much change her personality had survived distinct. She had remained herself.

I do not know what can be truly said to constitute success in life. Each person has his own view of that; of where the secret lies; whether it lies where Balliol found it in an avoidance of unhappiness; or his wife, in the discovery of an escape; or Stella, in the triumph of causes that she had at heart; or Lucy, in the surrender, in the self-obliteration into a personal and perhaps selfish happiness; or Hugh in a death that, though met belatedly, was in truth a soldier's; or Francis in the lists
of gallantry; or Helen in a new-found romance. It would be easy to argue that each one of them in their separate way had found solutions. But if the quotation that had hung over the mantelpiece in the girls' room were to be taken as the test, Ruth more than any of them had faced with “fortitude and delicacy” the changing fortunes of her life.

The road from St. Pancras to Camden Town was crowded. Ruth's foot rested lightly on the accelerator. But after Chalk Farm the road was clear. In barely five minutes we had turned the brow of the hill by the Bull and Bush.

It was the first time that I had been past Ilex for several months. The business of destruction was proceeding rapidly. The low wall with the chain-linked palings had been broken so that a broad plank-paved track for lorries could be run up from the pavement. The roof was off, scaffolding was round the walls. On the first floor the bricks had been struck away to the level of the white window frames. The whole of the front wall above the portico was gone. The house stood in skeleton. During the four years while it had been a nursing home the walls had been covered with a plain paper that would take whitewash. But now the cheap paper was peeling back, showing the papers that had hung there in the Balliols' time, the mauve and grey of the girls' room, Lucy's elaborate William Morris' foliage, the figured fairy-tale of the nursery: King Arthur, Little Red Riding Hood, Simple Simon; the sombre brown of Hugh's bed-sitting-room. It was as though for the last time and for a few moments Ruth was being shown her own girlhood, her sister's childhood, her brothers' youth. She sat there looking, silent; while the pickaxes of the workmen swung, the barrows emptied their loads, the walls, brick by brick, sank to the level of the garden.

A person, apparently of some consequence, a man in the early fifties, plump, tall, prosperous, a grey Homburg hat tilted over his right eye, a cigar in the corner of his mouth, strolled over to us. He imagined no doubt that we were prospective flat owners. He waved a hand towards the process of demolition.

“Fine block of flats we're going to put up here,” he said. “Every kind of flat: from the bachelor's bed-sitter to the rich city man with a wife and several kids who wants a home: modern, a real modern home, if you get me. Big garages: lock-ups for as many cars as there are flats; central heating; service; frigidaires. Make housekeeping easy. That's what people want nowadays. They don't want to be bothered with servants and cooks and housemaids. Of
course they don't. They want a small place in London, near their work. Something they can shut up over week-ends, knowing it'll be safe; get away somewhere in a car. Make the full use of their cars. Brighton, the Downs, that's living, that's life. A block of flats like this. When people see
this
they won't want to live in houses any more. A block of flats like this, in a place like this. A portent, that's what it is, a portent.”

He paused; then waved his hand towards the ruin. “A place like this now. Who wants a place like this nowadays? Four servants, who can afford that, who could get them if he could afford it? And what would he do with them when he had them? Spend his whole time looking after them, a prisoner in his own house. A place like this—” he paused again as though he were searching a limited vocabulary for the sufficiently opprobrious designation of this anachronism. Something, however, checked him, as though the sight of the tattered wallpapers touched a stream of sentiment; as though those pathetic survivals of the past were entitled to respect. “Ah well, it served its purpose.”

Ruth made no reply. She sat, her hand on the wheel. Looking at the peeling papers which had once framed her life and her family's, the reel of the past was turned for her, so that in one steady glance she could see their story as a completed whole, with all that it had contained of good and bad. It was a moment that some would sentimentalize, others sneer against: before which others would resort, in self-protection, to irony, bitterness, indifference. For Ruth it had the flavour of those cool dry Rhineland wines that taste sour on certain palates and tasteless upon another's, but for those that can appreciate them are rich and full. She closed her eyes as though she were savouring its bouquet, feeling its richness along her tongue; grateful that she could taste, knowing it for what it was, the wine that the years of her life had trodden.

A smile flickered on her lips. Then she turned away.

“Let's go.”

Without turning back, she put the car in gear, released the clutch. With a slow-quickening pace the car moved forward, soundlessly over the gleaming roadway to the lights at the hill's foot; the shops, the trams, the tubes, the sky signs, the roar and rattle of the machines.