The Complete Short Stories (23 page)

Dora Castlemaine had several diplomas for
elocution which she had never put to use. She got a part-time job, after the
Christmas holidays that year, in Basil Street Grammar School in London, and her
job was to try to reform the more pronounced Cockney accents of the more promising
boys into a near-standard English. Her father was amazed.

‘Money, money, you are
always talking about money. Let us run up debts. One is nobody without debts.’

‘One’s credit is limited,
Father. Don’t be an old goose.’

‘Have you consulted
Waite?’ Waite was the publisher’s young man who looked after the Castlemaine
royalties, diminishing year by year.

‘We’ve drawn more than
our due for the present.

‘Well, it’s a bore, you
going out to teach.’

‘It may be a bore for
you,’ she said at last, ‘but it isn’t for me.

‘Dora, do you really
mean you want to go to this job in London?’

‘Yes, I want to. I’m
looking forward to it.’

He didn’t believe her.
But he said, ‘I suppose I’m a bit of a burden on you, Dora, these days. Perhaps
I ought to go off and die.’

‘Like Oates at the South
Pole,’ Dora commented.

He looked at her and she
looked at him. They were shrewd in their love for each other.

She was the only woman
teacher in the school, with hardly the status of a teacher. She had her own
corner of the common room and, anxious to reassure the men that she had no
intention of intruding upon them, would, during free periods, spread out on the
table one of the weekly journals and study it intently, only looking up to say
good morning or good afternoon to the masters who came in with piles of
exercise books under their arms. Dora had no exercise books to correct, she was
something apart, a reformer of vowel sounds. One of the masters, and then
another, made conversation with her during morning break, when she passed round
the sugar for the coffee. Some were in their early thirties. The
ginger-moustached science master was not long graduated from Cambridge. Nobody
said to her, as intelligent young men had done as late as fifteen years ago, ‘Are
you any relation, Miss Castlemaine, to Henry Castlemaine the writer?’

Ben walked with Carmelita under the trees
of Lincoln’s Inn Fields in the spring of the year, after school, and watched
the children at their games. They were a beautiful couple. Carmelita was doing
secretarial work in the City. Her father was in Morocco, having first taken
them out to dinner to celebrate their engagement.

Ben said, ‘There’s a
woman at the school, teaching elocution.’

‘Oh?’ said Carmelita.
She was jumpy, because since her father’s departure for Morocco Ben had given
a new turn to their relationship. He would not let her stay overnight in his
fiat in Bayswater, not even at the weekends. He said it would be nice, perhaps,
to practise restraint until they were married in the summer, and that would
give them something to look forward to. ‘And I’m interested to see,’ said Ben, ‘what
we mean to each other without sex.

This made her understand
how greatly she had become obsessed with him. She thought perhaps he was
practising a form of cruelty to intensify her obsession. In fact, he did want
to see what they meant to each other without sex.

She called at his flat
unexpectedly and found him reading, with piles of other books set out on the table
as if waiting to be read.

She accused him: You
only want to get rid of me so that you can read your books.

‘The fourth form is
reading Trollope,’ he explained, pointing to a novel of Trollope’s among the
pile.

‘But you aren’t studying
Trollope just now.

He had been reading a
life of James Joyce. He banged it down and said, ‘I’ve been reading all my
life, and you won’t stop me, Carmelita.’ She sat down. ‘I don’t want to stop
you,’ she said.’

‘I know,’ he said.

‘We aren’t getting on at
all well without sex,’ she said, and on that occasion stayed the night.

He was writing an essay
on her father. She wished that her father had taken more interest in it. Father
had taken them out to dinner with his party face, smiling and boyish. Carmelita
had seen him otherwise — in his acute dejection, when he seemed hardly able to
endure the light of day.

‘What’s the matter,
Father?’

‘There’s a comedy of
errors going on inside me, Carmelita.’ He sat at his desk most of the day while
he was in these moods, doing nothing. Then, during the night, he would perhaps
start writing, and sleep all the next morning, and gradually in the following
days the weight would pass.

‘There’s a man on the
phone wants you, Father — an interview.’

‘Tell him I’m in the
Middle East.’

‘What did you think of
Ben, Father?’

‘A terribly nice man,
Carmelita. You’ve made the right choice, I think.’

‘An intellectual — I do
like them best, you know.’

‘I’d say he was the
student type. Always will be.’

‘He wants to write an
essay about you, Father. He’s absolutely mad about your books.’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean, couldn’t you
help him, Father? Couldn’t you talk to him about your work, you know?’

‘Oh, God, Carmelita. It
would be easier to write the bloody essay myself.’

‘All right, all right. I
was only asking.’

‘I don’t want any
disciples, Carmelita. They give me the creeps.

‘Yes, yes, all right. I
know you’re an artist, Father, there’s no need to show off your temperament. I
only wanted you to help Ben. I only …’

I only, she thought as
she walked in Lincoln’s Inn Fields with Ben, wanted him to help me. I should
have said, ‘I want you to talk more to Ben, to help me.’ And Father would have
said, ‘How do you mean?’ And I would have said, ‘I don’t know, quite.’ And he
would have said, ‘Well, if you don’t know what you mean, how the hell do I?’

Ben was saying, ‘There’s
a woman at the school, teaching elocution.’

‘Oh?’ said Carmelita
jumpily.

‘A Miss Castlemaine. She’s
been there four months, and I only found Out today that she’s the daughter of
Henry Castlemaine.’

‘But he’s dead!’ said
Carmelita.

‘Well, I thought so too.
But apparently he isn’t dead, he’s very much alive in a house in Essex.’

‘How old is Miss
Castlemaine?’ said Carmelita.

‘Middle-aged. Middle
forties. Perhaps late forties. She’s a nice woman, a classic English spinster.
She teaches the boys to say “How now brown cow.” You could imagine her doing
wood-engravings in the Cotswolds. I only found out today —’

‘You might manage to get
invited to meet him, with any luck,’ Carmelita said.

‘Yes, she said I must
come and see him, perhaps for a weekend. Miss Castlemaine is going to arrange
it. She was awfully friendly when she found I was a Castlemaine admirer. A lot
of people must think he’s dead. Of course, his work belongs to a past world,
but it’s wonderful. Do you know
The Pebbled Shore?
— that’s an early
one.

‘No, but I’ve read
Sin
of Substance,
I think It —’

‘You mean
The Sinner
and the Substance.
Oh, it has fine things in it. Castlemaine’s due for a
revival.’

Carmelita felt a sharp
stab of anger with her father, and then a kind of despair which was not as yet
entirely familiar to her, although already she wondered if this was how Father
felt in his great depressions when he sat all day, staring and enduring, and
all night miraculously wrote the ache out of his system in prose of harsh
merriment.

Helplessly, she said, ‘Castlemaine’s
novels aren’t as good as Father’s, are they?’

‘Oh, there’s no
comparison. Castlemaine is quite different. You can’t say one type is
better
than another — goodness me!’ He was looking academically towards the
chimney stacks of Lincoln’s Inn. This was the look in which she loved him most.
After all, she thought, the Castlemaines might make everything easier for both
of us.

‘Father, it’s really absurd. A difference
of sixteen years … People will say —’

‘Don’t be vulgar, Dora
dear. What does it matter what people say? Mere age makes no difference when
there’s a true affinity, a marriage of true minds.’

‘Ben and I have a lot in
common.

‘I know it,’ he said,
and sat a little higher in his chair.

‘I shall be able to give
up my job, Father, and spend my time here with you again. I never really wanted
that job. And you are so much better in health now …’

‘I know.’

‘And Ben will be here in
the evenings and the weekends. You get on well with Ben, don’t you?’

‘A remarkably fine man,
Dora. He’ll go far. He’s perceptive.’

‘He’s keen to revive
your work.’

‘I know. He should give
up that job, as I told him, and devote himself entirely to literary studies. A
born essayist.’

‘Oh, Father, he’ll have
to keep his job for the meantime, anyhow. We’ll need the money. It will help us
all; we —’

‘What’s that? What’s
that you say?’

‘I said he finds work in
the grammar school stimulating, Father.’

‘Do you love the man?’

‘It’s a little difficult
to say, at my age, Father.’

‘To me, you both seem
children. Do you love him?’

‘I feel,’ she said, ‘that
I have known him much longer than I have. Sometimes I think I’ve known him all
my life. I’m sure we have met before, perhaps even in a former existence. That’s
the decisive factor. There’s something
of destiny
about my marrying Ben;
do you know what I mean?’

‘Yes, I think I do.’

‘He was engaged, last
year for a short time, to marry quite a young girl,’ she said. ‘The daughter of
a novelist called Kenneth Hope. Have you heard of him, Father?’

‘Vaguely,’ he said. ‘Ben,’
he said, ‘is a born disciple.’

She looked at him and he
looked at her, shrewd in their love for each other.

Open to the Public

This story, written in 1989, is a sequel to ‘The Fathers’ Daughters’, 1959

Warily she moves from room to room,
lingering over the mortal furniture which resembles in style, but has long
since replaced, the lost originals. This is the house of the young Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, Les Charmettes, on the outskirts of Chambéry in the Savoie district
of France, where from 1736 to 1742 he vitally resided with clever Mme de
Warens, his mature friend, thirteen years his senior, to whom he was official
lover and whom he called ‘Maman’. It was their summer residence.

It is early spring.
There had been few visitors, the guardian has told her when she bought her
ticket and a brochure, downstairs at the entrance. As in most of these
out-of-the-way preserved houses of the famous, the good guardian was willing to
unfold the history of the place down there in his lodge beside a stove, and not
at all anxious about letting a well-behaved and quiet-looking visitor roam free
among the chilly rooms, downstairs and up.

It is upstairs that she
finds a fellow-visitor. She is not sure why she is surprised but possibly this
is because she hasn’t heard him moving about until she comes upon him staring
into the little alcove where Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bed, or a replica of his
bed, is fitted.

The man is tall and
thin, somewhere about thirty, casually dressed in a black short coat and
greenish-brown trousers. When he turns to look at her she sees his jersey is
black with a rim of his white shirt showing at the neck, so that one might take
him for a clergyman, but for the trousers. He has a long face, fairish hair,
greyish eyes. His casual outfit is slightly outdated although in fact quite
smart and expensive. And she has seen him before. He looks away and then he
looks again in her direction. Why?

Because he has seen her before.

She continues her tour
of the rooms, noticing details as is her way. Close details. The wallpaper in Mme
de Warens’s room is original eighteenth century, it is said, with small
hand-painted flowers. This is the grandest room in the house. Two great windows
look out on to the cold garden of early spring and beyond that, the valley and
the mountains. Down there in the garden the enamoured young man Rousseau waited
each morning, looking up for the shutters to open and ‘it was day
chez maman
—She goes downstairs again, having another look at all there is to see.

She sees the other
visitor at the porter’s vestibule, his back turned towards her. He is buying
postcards. She leaves the museum and goes her way. Outside the gates a small
cream-coloured Peugeot is parked.

You must have heard of Ben Donadieu, the
biographer and son-in-law of Henry Castlemaine the novelist. He had married
Dora Castlemaine in 1960, passionate about her ageing father’s once-famous
novels which were already falling into a phase of obscurity. About Dora herself
he was not at all passionate and for this she was rather thankful. Sixteen
years older than Ben, she was then forty-six, spinsterish. Her true object of
love was her once-famous father. She married Ben, then about thirty, mainly
because he had a job as a schoolmaster, a means of livelihood to assist her
father’s dwindling income and to enable her to give up her job and devote
herself to her father.

Henry Castlemaine loved
his daughter dearly, and himself a little more. He accepted the basis of the
marriage as he had in the long past accepted the adulation of his readers and
the discipleship of young critics. Ben moved into the Castlemaine house and in
the evenings and school holidays set about sorting the Castlemaine papers, and
taking voluminous notes on his conversations with the ageing novelist.
Castlemaine was now eighty-five.

It was about three years
later, after the biography was published, that the Castlemaine revival set in.
The Castlemaine novels were reprinted, they were filmed and televised. When
Henry Castlemaine died he was once again at the height of his fame.