A Question of Upbringing (3 page)

‘That bit of the Conference is finished.’

‘Where is he?’

‘London.’

‘On leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘The War Office haven’t decided where they are going to send him?’

‘No.’

My uncle looked put out at this piece of news. It was most unlikely, hardly conceivable, that he really intended to impose his company on my father, who had for many
years discouraged close association with his brother, except when possessed with an occasional and uncontrollable desire to tell Uncle Giles to his face what he thought of him, a mood that rarely lasted more than thirty-six hours; by the end of which period of time the foredoomed inefficacy of any such contact made itself clear.

‘In London, is he?’ said Uncle Giles, wrinkling the dry, reddish skin at the sides of his nostrils, under which a web of small grey veins etched on his nose seemed to imply preliminary outlines for a game of noughts-and-crosses. He brought out a leather cigarette-case and—before I could prevent him—lighted a cigarette.

‘Visitors are not really supposed to smoke here.’

‘Oh, aren’t they?’ said Uncle Giles. He looked very surprised. ‘Why not?’

‘Well, if the place smells of smoke, you can’t tell if someone else smokes too.’

‘Of course you can’t,’ said Uncle Giles readily, blowing outward a long jet of smoke. He seemed puzzled.

‘Le Bas might think a boy had been smokihg.’

‘Who is Le Bas?’

‘Our housemaster.’

How he had managed to find the house if he were ignorant of Le Bas’s identity was mysterious: even inexplicable. It was, however, in keeping with the way my uncle conducted his life that he should reach his destination without knowing the name of the goal. He continued to take small puffs at his cigarette.

‘I see,’ he said.

‘Boys aren’t allowed to smoke.’

‘Quite right. Stunts the growth. It is a great mistake to smoke before you are twenty-one.’

Uncle Giles straightened his back and squared his shoulders. One had the impression that he was well aware
that young people of the day could scarcely attempt to compete with the rigorous standards that had governed his own youth. He shook his head and flicked some ash on to one of the dirty plates.

‘It is a hundred to one Le Bas won’t come in,’ said Stringham. ‘I should take a chance on it.’

‘Take a chance on what?’ Uncle Giles asked.

‘On smoking.’

‘You mean I really ought to put this out?’

‘Don’t bother.’

‘Most certainly I shall bother,’ said Uncle Giles. ‘I should not dream of breaking a rule of that sort. Rules are made to be obeyed, however foolish they may sometimes seem. The question is where had I best put this, now that the regulation has been broken?’

By the time my uncle had decided to extinguish the cigarette on the sole of his shoe, and throw the butt into the fire, there was not much left of it. Stringham collected the ash, which had by now found its way into several receptacles, brushing all of this also into the cinders. For the rest of tea, Uncle Giles, who, for the time being at least, had evidently dismissed from his mind the question of discussing arrangements for meeting my father, discoursed, not very lucidly, on the possibility of a moratorium in connexion with German reparations and the fall of the mark. Uncle Giles’s sympathies were with the Germans. ‘They work hard,’ he said. ‘Therefore they have my respect.’ Why he had suddenly turned up in the manner was not yet clear. When tea came to an end he muttered about wanting to discuss family matters, and, after saying good-bye—for my uncle, almost effusively—to Stringham, he followed me along the passage.

‘Who was that?’ he asked, when we were alone together. As a rule Uncle Giles took not the slightest interest in
anyone or anything except himself and his own affairs—indeed was by this time all but incapable of absorbing even the smallest particle of information about others, unless such information had some immediate bearing on his own case. I was therefore surprised when he listened with a show of comparative attention to what I could tell him about Stringham’s family. When I had finished, he remarked:

‘I used to meet his grandfather in Cape Town.’

‘What was he doing there?’

‘His mother’s father, that was. He made a huge fortune. Not a bad fellow. Knew all the right people, of course.’

‘Diamonds?’

I was familiar with detective stories in which South African millionaires had made their money in diamonds.

‘Gold,’ said Uncle Giles, narrowing his eyes.

My uncle’s period in South Africa was one of the several stretches of his career not too closely examined by other members of his family—or, if examined, not discussed—and I hoped that he might be about to give some account of experiences I had always been warned not to enquire into. However, he said no more than: ‘I saw your friend’s mother once when she was married to Lord Warrington and a very good-looking woman she was.’

‘Who was Lord Warrington?’

‘Much older than she was. He died. Never a good life, Warrington’s. And so you always have tea with young Stringham?’

‘And another boy called Templer.’

‘Where was Templer?’ asked Uncle Giles, rather suspiciously, as if he supposed that someone might have been spying on him unawares, or that he had been swindled out of something.

‘In London, having his eyes seen to.’

‘What is wrong with his eyes?’

‘They ache when he works.’

My uncle thought over this statement, which conveyed in Templer’s own words his personal diagnosis of this ocular complaint. Uncle Giles was evidently struck by some similarity of experience, because he was silent for several seconds. I spoke more about Stringham, but Uncle Giles had come to the end of his faculty for absorbing statements regarding other people. He began to tap with his knuckles on the window-pane, continuing this tattoo until I had given up attempting, so far as I knew it, to describe Stringham’s background.

‘It is about the Trust,’ said Uncle Giles, coming abruptly to the end of his drumming, and adopting a manner at once accusing and seasoned with humility.

The Trust, therefore, was at the bottom of this visitation. The Trust explained this arrival by night in winter. If I had thought harder, such an explanation might have occurred to me earlier; but at that age I cannot pretend that I felt greatly interested in the Trust, a subject so often ventilated in my hearing. Perhaps the enormous amount of time and ingenuity that had been devoted by other members of my family to examining the Trust from its innumerable aspects had even decreased for me its intrinsic attraction. In fact the topic bored me. Looking back, I can understand the fascination that the Trust possessed for my relations: especially for those, like Uncle Giles, who benefited from it to a greater or lesser degree. In those days the keenness of their interest seemed something akin to madness.

The money came from a great-aunt, who had tied it up in such a way as to raise what were, I believe, some quite interesting questions of legal definition. In addition to this, one of my father’s other brothers, Uncle Martin, also a
beneficiary, a bachelor, killed at the second battle of the Marne, had greatly complicated matters, although there was not a great deal of money to divide, by leaving a will of his own devising, which still further secured the capital without making it absolutely clear who should enjoy the interest. My father and Uncle Giles had accordingly come to a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on the subject of their respective shares (which brought in about one hundred and eighty-five pounds annually, or possibly nearly two hundred in a good year); but Uncle Giles had never been satisfied that he was receiving the full amount to which he was by right entitled: so that when times were hard—which happened about every eighteen months—he used to apply pressure with a view to squeezing out a few pounds more than his agreed portion. The repetition of these tactics, forgotten for a time and then breaking out again like one of Uncle Giles’s duodenal ulcers, had the effect of making my father exceedingly angry; and, taken in conjunction with the rest of my uncle’s manner of life, they had resulted in an almost complete severance of relations between the two brothers.

‘As you probably know,’ said Uncle Giles, ‘I owe your father a small sum of money. Nothing much. Decent of him to have given me the use of it, all the same. Some brothers wouldn’t have done as much. I just wanted to tell him that I proposed to let him have the sum in question back.’

This proposal certainly suggested an act to which, on the face of it, there appeared no valid objection; but my uncle, perhaps from force of habit, continued to approach the matter circumspectly. ‘It is just a question of the trustees,’ he said once or twice; and he proceeded to embark on explanations that seemed to indicate that he had some idea of presenting through myself the latest case for the adjustment
of his revenue: tacking on repayment of an ancient debt as a piece of live bait. Any reason that might have been advanced earlier for my becoming the medium in these negotiations, on the grounds that my father was still out of England, had been utterly demolished by the information that he was to be found in London. However, tenacity in certain directions—notably that of the Trust—was one of Uncle Giles’s characteristics. He was also habitually unwilling to believe that altered circumstances might affect any matter upon which he had already made up his mind. He therefore entered now upon a comprehensive account of the terms of the Trust, his own pecuniary embarrassment, the forbearance he had shown in the past—both to his relations and the world at large—and the reforms he suggested for the future.

‘I’m not a great business expert,’ he said, ‘I don’t claim to be a master brain of finance or anything of that sort. The only training I ever had was to be a soldier. We know how much use that is. All the same, I’ve had a bit of experience in my day. I’ve knocked about the world and roughed it. Perhaps I’m not quite so green as I look.’

Uncle Giles became almost truculent for a man with normally so quiet a manner when he said this; as if he expected that I was prepared to argue that he was indeed ‘green’, or, through some other similar failing, unsuited to run his own affairs. I felt, on the contrary, that in some ways it had to be admitted that he was unusually well equipped for looking after himself: in any case a subject I should not have taken upon myself to dispute with him. There was, therefore, nothing to do but agree to pass on anything he had to say. His mastery of the hard-luck story was of a kind never achieved by persons not wholly concentrated on themselves.

‘Quand même,’ he said at the end of a tremendous parade
of facts and figures, ‘I suppose there is such a thing as family feeling?’

I mumbled.

‘After all there was the Jenkins they fought the War of Jenkins’s Ear about.’

‘Yes.’

‘We are all descended from him.’

‘Not directly.’

‘Collaterally then.’

‘It has never been proved, has it?’

‘What I mean is that he was a relation and that should keep us together.’

‘Well, our ancestor, Hannibal Jenkins, of Cwm Shenkin, paid the Hearth Tax in 1674——’

Perhaps justifiably, Uncle Giles made a gesture as if to dismiss pedantry—and especially genealogical pedantry—in all its protean shapes: at the same time picking up his hat. He said: ‘All I mean is that just because I am a bit of a radical, it doesn’t mean that I believe tradition counts for nothing.’

‘Of course not.’

‘Don’t think that for a moment.’

‘Not a bit.’

‘Then you will put it to your father?’

‘All right.’

‘Can you get leave to walk with me as far as the station?’

‘No.’

We set off together down the stairs, Uncle Giles continually stopping on the way to elaborate points omitted in his earlier argument. This was embarrassing, as other boys were hanging about the passages, and I tried, without success, to hurry him along. The front door was locked, and Cattle, the porter, had to be found to obtain the key. For a time we wandered about in a kind of no-man’s-land
of laundry baskets and coke, until Cattle, more or less asleep, was at last discovered in the boot-room. A lumbering, disagreeable character, he unlocked the door under protest, letting into the house a cloud of fog. Uncle Giles reached the threshold and plunged his hand deep into his trouser pocket as if in search of a coin: stood for what seemed an age sunk in reverie: thought better of an earlier impulse: and stepped briskly out into the mist with a curt ‘Good-night to you’. He was instantly swallowed up in the gloom, and I was left standing on the steps with Cattle, whose grousing, silenced for the passage of time during which there had seemed hope of money changing hands, now began to rumble again like the buzz of distant traffic. As I returned slowly up the stairs, this sound of complaint sank to a low growling, punctuated with sharp clangs as the door was once more laboriously locked, bolted, and chained.

On the whole it could not be said that one felt better for Uncle Giles’s visit. He brought with him some fleeting suggestion, always welcome at school, of an outside world: though against this had to be weighed the disturbing impact of home-life in school surroundings: even home-life in its diminished and undomestic embodiment represented by my uncle. He was a relation: a being who had in him perhaps some of the same essence that went towards forming oneself as a separate entity. Would one’s adult days be spent in worrying about the Trust? What was he going to do at Reading? Did he manage to have quite a lot of fun, or did he live in perpetual hell? These were things to be considered. Some apology for his sudden appearance seemed owed to Stringham: after that, I might try to do some work to be dealt with over the week-end.

When I reached the door I heard a complaining voice raised inside the room. Listening for a moment, I recognised
the tone as Le Bas’s. He was not best pleased. I went in. Le Bas had come to find Templer, and was now making a fuss about the cigarette smoke.

‘Here is Jenkins, sir,’ said Stringham. ‘He has just been seeing his uncle out of the house.’

He glanced across at me, putting on an expression to indicate that the ball was now at my foot. The room certainly smelt abominably of smoke when entered from the passage. Le Bas was evidently pretty angry.