The Pursuit of Love (4 page)

The poor Hons were tormented by the cruelties of the countryside, while, to me, holidays at Alconleigh were a perfect revelation of beastliness. Aunt Emily’s little house was in a village; it was a Queen Anne box; red brick, white panelling, a magnolia tree and a delicious fresh smell. Between it and the country were a neat little garden, an ironwork fence, a village green and a village. The country one then came to was very different from Gloucestershire, it was emasculated, sheltered, over-cultivated, almost a suburban garden. At Alconleigh the cruel woods crept right up to the house; it was not unusual to be awoken by the screams of a rabbit running in horrified circles round a stoat, by the strange and awful cry of the dog-fox, or to see from one’s bedroom window a live hen being carried away in the mouth of a vixen; while the roosting pheasant and the waking owl filled every night with wild primeval noise. In the winter, when snow covered the ground, we could trace the footprints of many creatures. These often ended in a pool of blood, a mass of fur or feathers, bearing witness to successful hunting by the carnivores.

On the other side of the house, within a stone’s throw, was the Home Farm. Here the slaughtering of poultry and pigs, the castration of lambs and the branding of cattle took place as a matter of course, out in the open for whoever might be passing
by to see. Even dear old Josh made nothing of firing, with red-hot irons, a favourite horse after the hunting season.

‘You can only do two legs at a time,’ he would say, hissing through his teeth as though one were a horse and he grooming one, ‘otherwise they can’t stand the pain.’

Linda and I were bad at standing pain ourselves, and found it intolerable that animals should have to lead such tormented lives and tortured deaths. (I still do mind, very much indeed, but in those days at Alconleigh it was an absolute obsession with us all.)

The humanitarian activities of the Hons were forbidden, on pain of punishment, by Uncle Matthew, who was always and entirely on the side of Craven, his favourite servant. Pheasants and partridges must be preserved, vermin must be put down rigorously, all except the fox, for whom a more exciting death was in store. Many and many a whacking did the poor Hons suffer, week after week their pocket-money was stopped, they were sent to bed early, given extra practising to do; nevertheless they bravely persisted with their discouraged and discouraging activities. Huge cases full of new steel traps would arrive periodically from the Army & Navy Stores, and lie stacked until required round Craven’s hut in the middle of the wood (an old railway carriage was his headquarters, situated, most inappropriately, among the primroses and blackberry bushes of a charming little glade); hundreds of traps, making one feel the futility of burying, at great risk to life and property, a paltry three or four. Sometimes we would find a screaming animal held in one; it would take all our reserves of courage to go up to it and let it out, to see it run away with three legs and a dangling mangled horror. We knew that it then probably died of blood-poisoning in its lair; Uncle Matthew would rub in this fact, sparing no agonizing detail of the long drawn-out ordeal, but, though we knew it would be kinder, we could never bring ourselves to kill them; it was asking too much. Often, as it was, we had to go away and be sick after these episodes.

The Hons’ meeting-place was a disused linen cupboard at the top of the house, small, dark, and intensely hot. As in so many country houses the central-heating apparatus at Alconleigh had
been installed in the early days of the invention, at enormous expense, and was now thoroughly out of date. In spite of a boiler which would not have been too large for an Atlantic liner, in spite of the tons of coke which it consumed daily, the temperature of the living-rooms was hardly affected, and all the heat there was seemed to concentrate in the Hons’ cupboard, which was always stifling. Here we would sit, huddled up on the slatted shelves, and talk for hours about life and death.

Last holidays our great obsession had been childbirth, on which entrancing subject we were informed remarkably late, having supposed for a long time that a mother’s stomach swelled up for nine months and then burst open like a ripe pumpkin, shooting out the infant. When the real truth dawned upon us it seemed rather an anticlimax, until Linda produced, from some novel, and read out loud in ghoulish tones, the description of a woman in labour.

‘Her breath comes in great gulps – sweat pours down her brow like water – screams as of a tortured animal rend the air – and can this face, twisted with agony, be that of my darling Rhona – can this torture-chamber really be our bedroom, this rack our marriage-bed? “Doctor, doctor,” I cried, “do something” – I rushed out into the night’ – and so on.

We were rather disturbed by this, realizing that too probably we in our turn would have to endure these fearful agonies. Aunt Sadie, who had only just finished having her seven children, when appealed to, was not very reassuring.

‘Yes,’ she said, vaguely. ‘It is the worst pain in the world. But the funny thing is, you always forget in between what it’s like. Each time, when it began, I felt like saying, “Oh, now I can remember, stop it, stop it.” And, of course, by then it was nine months too late to stop it.’

At this point Linda began to cry, saying how dreadful it must be for cows, which brought the conversation to an end.

It was difficult to talk to Aunt Sadie about sex; something always seemed to prevent one; babies were the nearest we ever got to it. She and Aunt Emily, feeling at one moment that we ought to know more, and being, I suspect, too embarrassed to
enlighten us themselves, gave us a modern textbook on the subject.

We got hold of some curious ideas.

‘Jassy,’ said Linda one day, scornfully, ‘is obsessed, poor thing, with sex.’

‘Obsessed with sex!’ said Jassy, ‘there’s nobody so obsessed as you, Linda. Why if I so much as look at a picture you say I’m a pygmalionist.’

In the end we got far more information out of a book called
Ducks and Duck Breeding
.

‘Ducks can only copulate,’ said Linda, after studying this for a while, ‘in running water. Good luck to them.’

This Christmas Eve we all packed into the Hons’ meeting-place to hear what Linda bad to say – Louisa, Jassy, Bob, Matt, and I.

‘Talk about back-to-the-womb,’ said Jassy.

‘Poor Aunt Sadie,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t think she’d want you all back in hers.’

‘You never know. Now rabbits eat their children – somebody ought to explain to them how it’s only a complex.’

‘How can one
explain
to
rabbits?
That’s what is so worrying about animals, they simply don’t understand when they’re spoken to, poor angels. I’ll tell you what about Sadie though, she’d like to be back in one herself, she’s got a thing for boxes and that always shows. Who else – Fanny, what about you?’

‘I don’t think I would, but then I imagine the one I was in wasn’t very comfortable at the time you know, and nobody else has ever been allowed to stay there.’

‘Abortions?’ said Linda with interest.

‘Well, tremendous jumpings and hot baths anyway.’

‘How
do
you know?’

‘I once heard Aunt Emily and Aunt Sadie talking about it when I was very little, and afterwards I remembered. Aunt Sadie said: “How does she manage it?” and Aunt Emily said: “Skiing, or hunting, or just jumping off the kitchen table.”’

‘You are so lucky, having wicked parents.’

This was the perpetual refrain of the Radletts, and, indeed,
my wicked parents constituted my chief interest in their eyes – I was really a very dull little girl in other respects.

‘The news I have for the Hons to-day,’ said Linda, clearing her throat like a grown-up person, ‘while of considerable Hon interest generally, particularly concerns Fanny. I won’t ask you to guess, because it’s nearly tea-time and you never could, so I’ll tell you straight out. Aunt Emily is engaged.’

There was a gasp from the Hons in chorus.

‘Linda,’ I said, furiously, ‘you’ve made it up.’ But I knew she couldn’t have.

Linda brought a piece of paper out of her pocket. It was a half-sheet of writing-paper, evidently the end of a letter, covered with Aunt Emily’s large babyish handwriting, and I looked over Linda’s shoulder as she read it out:

‘… not tell the children we’re engaged, what d’you think darling, just at first? But then suppose Fanny takes a dislike to him, though I don’t see how she could, but children are so funny, won’t it be more of a shock? Oh, dear, I can’t decide. Anyway, do what you think best, darling, we’ll arrive on Thursday, and I’ll telephone on Wednesday evening and see what’s happened. All love from Emily.’

Sensation in the Hons’ cupboard.

‘B
UT
why?’ I said, for the hundredth time.

Linda Louisa, and I were packed into Louisa’s bed, with Bob sitting on the end of it, chatting in whispers. These midnight talks were most strictly forbidden, but it was safer, at Alconleigh, to disobey rules during the early part of the night than at any other time in the twenty-four hours. Uncle Matthew fell asleep practically at the dinner-table. He would then doze in his business-room for an hour or so before dragging himself, in a somnambulist trance, to bed, where he slept the profound sleep of one who has been out of doors all day, until cockcrow
the following morning, when he became very much awake. This was the time for his never-ending warfare with the housemaids over wood-ash. The rooms at Alconleigh were heated by wood fires, and Uncle Matthew maintained, rightly, that if these were to function properly, all the ash ought to be left in the fireplaces in a great hot smouldering heap. Every housemaid, however, for some reason (an early training with coal fires probably) was bent on removing this ash altogether. When shakings, imprecations, and being pounced out at by Uncle Matthew in his paisley dressing-gown at six a.m., had convinced them that this was not really feasible, they became absolutely determined to remove, by hook or by crook, just a little, a shovelful or so, every morning. I can only suppose they felt that like this they were asserting their personalities.

The result was guerrilla warfare at its most exciting. Housemaids are notoriously early risers, and can usually count upon three clear hours when a house belongs to them alone. But not at Alconleigh. Uncle Matthew was always, winter and summer alike, out of his bed by five a.m., and it was then his habit to wander about, looking like Great Agrippa in his dressing-gown, and drinking endless cups of tea out of a thermos flask, until about seven, when he would have his bath. Breakfast for my uncle, my aunt, family, and guests alike, was sharp at eight, and unpunctuality was not tolerated. Uncle Matthew was no respecter of other people’s early morning sleep, and after five o’clock one could not count on any, for he raged round the house, clanking cups of tea, shouting at his dogs, roaring at the housemaids, cracking the stock whips which he had brought back from Canada on the lawn with a noise greater than gunfire, and all to the accompaniment of Galli Curd on his gramophone, an abnormally loud one, with an enormous horn, through which would be shrieked ‘Una voce poco fà’ – ‘The Mad Song’ from
Lucia
– ‘Lo, here the gen-tel lar-ha-hark’ – and so on, played at top speed, thus rendering them even higher and more screeching than they ought to be.

Nothing reminds me of my childhood days at Alconleigh so much as those songs. Uncle Matthew played them incessantly for years, until the spell was broken when he went all the way
to Liverpool to hear Galli Curci in person. The disillusionment caused by her appearance was so great that the records remained ever after silent, and were replaced by the deepest bass voices that money could buy.

‘Fearful the death of the diver must be,

Walking alone in the de-he-he-he-he-epths of the sea’ or ‘Drake is going West, lads.’

These were, on the whole, welcomed by the family, as rather less piercing at early dawn.

*

‘Why should she want to be married?’

‘It’s not as though she could be in love. She’s forty.’

Like all the very young we took it for granted that making love is child’s play.

‘How old do you suppose he is?’

‘Fifty or sixty I guess. Perhaps she thinks it would be nice to be a widow. Weeds, you know.’

‘Perhaps she thinks Fanny ought to have a man’s influence.’

‘Man’s influence!’ said Louisa. ‘I forsee trouble. Supposing he falls in love with Fanny, that’ll be a pretty kettle of fish, like Somerset and Princess Elizabeth – he’ll be playing rough games and pinching you in bed, see if he doesn’t’

‘Surely not, at his age.’

‘Old men love little girls.’

‘And little boys,’ said Bob.

‘It looks as if Aunt Sadie isn’t going to say anything about it before they come,’ I said.

‘There’s nearly a week to go – she may be deciding. She’ll talk it over with Fa. Might be worth listening next time she has a bath. You can, Bob.’

*

Christmas Day was spent, as usual at Alconleigh, between alternate bursts of sunshine and showers. I put, as children can, the disturbing news about Aunt Emily out of my mind, and concentrated upon enjoyment. At about six o’clock Linda and
I unstuck our sleepy eyes and started on our stockings. Our real presents came later, at breakfast and on the tree, but the stockings were a wonderful
hors d’œuvre
and full of treasures. Presently Jassy came in and started selling us things out of hers. Jassy only cared about money because she was saving up to run away – she carried her post office book about with her everywhere, and always knew to a farthing what she had got. This was then translated by a miracle of determination as Jassy was very bad at sums, into so many days in a bed-sitting-room.