A Question of Upbringing (8 page)

‘It was Buster’s idea. He thought you would like it.’

‘That was kind of him.’

‘I expect you boys—can I still call you boys?—are going to a matinee this afternoon.’

I told her that I had, unfortunately, to catch a train to the country.

‘Oh, but that is too sad,’ she said, seeming quite cast down. ‘Where are you making for?’

I explained that the journey was to the west of England, where my father was on the staff of a Corps Headquarters. Thinking that the exigencies of army life might in all likelihood be unfamiliar to her, I added something about often finding myself in a place different from that in which I had spent previous holidays.

‘I know all about the army,’ she said. ‘My first husband
was a soldier. That was ages ago, of course. Even apart from that we had a house on the Curragh, because he used to train his horses there—so that nothing about soldiering is a mystery to me.’

There was something curiously overpowering about her. Now she seemed to have attached the army to herself, like a piece of property rediscovered after lying for long years forgotten. Lord Warrington had, it appeared, commanded a cavalry brigade before he retired. She told stories of the Duke of Cambridge, and talked of Kitchener and his collection of china.

‘Are you going to be a soldier too?’ she asked.

‘No.’

‘I think Charles ought. Anyway for a time. But he doesn’t seem awfully keen.’

‘No,’ said Stringham, ‘he doesn’t.’

‘But your father liked his time in the Grenadiers,’ she insisted. ‘He always said it did him a lot of good.’

She looked so beseeching when she said this that Stringham burst out laughing; and I laughed too. Even Miss Weedon smiled at the notion that anything so transitory as service with the Grenadiers could ever have done Stringham’s father good. Stringham himself had seemed to be on the edge of one of his fits of depression; but now he cheered up for a time: though his mother seemed to exhaust his energies and subdue him. This was not surprising, considering the force of her personality, which perhaps explained some of Buster’s need for an elaborate mechanism of self-defence. Except this force, which had something unrestrained, almost alien, about it, she showed no sign whatever of her South African origin. It is true that I did not know what to expect as outward marks of such antecedents; though I had perhaps supposed that in some manner she would be less assimilated
into the world in which she now lived. She said: ‘This is the last time you will see Charles until he comes back from Kenya.’

‘We meet in the autumn.’

‘I wish I wasn’t going,’ Stringham said. ‘It really is the most desperate bore. Can’t I get out of it?’

‘But, darling, you are sailing in two days’ time. I thought you wanted to go. And your father would be so disappointed.’

‘Would he?’

His mother sighed. Stringham’s despondency, briefly postponed, was now once more in the ascendant. Miss Weedon said with emphasis: ‘But you will be back soon.’

Stringham did not answer; but he shot her a look almost of hatred. She was evidently used to rough treatment from him, because she appeared not at all put out by this, and rattled on about the letters she had been writing that morning. The look of disappointment she had shown earlier was to be attributed, perhaps, to her being still unaccustomed to having him at home again, with the kindnesses and cruelties his presence entailed for her. The meal proceeded. Miss Weedon and Mrs. Foxe became involved in a discussion as to whether or not the head-gardener at Glimber was selling the fruit for his own profit. Stringham and I talked of school affairs. The luncheon party—the whole house—was in an obscure way depressing. I had looked forward to coming there, but was quite glad when it was time to go.

‘Write and tell me anything that may happen,’ said Stringham, at the door. ‘Especially anything funny that Peter may do.’

I promised to report any of Templer’s outstanding adventures, and we arranged to meet in nine or ten months’ time.

‘I shall long to come back to England,’ Stringham said. ‘Not that I specially favour the idea of universities. Undergraduates all look so wizened, and suède shoes appear to be compulsory.’

Berkeley Square, as I drove through it, was cold and bright and remote: like Buster’s manner. I wondered how it would be to return to school with only the company of Templer for the following year; because there was no one else with any claim to take Stringham’s place, so that Templer and I would be left alone together. Stringham’s removal was going to alter the orientation of everyday life. I found a place in a crowded compartment, next to the engine, beside an elderly man wearing a check suit, who, for the whole journey, quarrelled quietly with a clergyman on the subject of opening the window, kept on taking down a dispatch-case from the rack and rummaging through it for papers that never seemed to be there, and in a general manner reminded me of the goings-on of Uncle Giles.

Uncle Giles’s affairs had, in fact, moved recently towards something like a climax. After nearly two years of silence—since the moment when he had disappeared into the fog, supposedly on his way to Reading—nothing had been heard of him; until one day a letter had arrived, headed with the address of an hotel in the Isle of Man, the contents of which implied, though did not state, that he intended to get married. In anticipation of this contingency, my uncle advocated a thorough overhaul of the conditions of the Trust; and expressed, not for the first time, the difficulties that lay in the path of a man without influence.

This news caused my parents some anxiety; for, although Uncle Giles’s doings during the passage of time that had taken place were unknown in detail, his connection with
Reading had been established, with fair certainty, to be the result of an association with a lady who lived there: some said a manicurist: others the widow of a garage-proprietor. There was, indeed, no reason why she should not have sustained both rôles. The topic was approached in the family circle with even more gloom, and horrified curiosity, than Uncle Giles’s activities usually aroused: misgiving being not entirely groundless, since Uncle Giles was known to be almost as indiscriminate in dealings with the opposite sex as he was unreliable in business negotiation. His first serious misadventure, when stationed in Egypt as a young man, had, indeed, centred upon a love affair.

It was one of Uncle Giles’s chief complaints that he had been ‘put’ into the army—for which he possessed neither Mrs. Foxe’s romantic admiration nor her hard-headed grasp of military realities—instead of entering some unspecified profession in which his gifts would have been properly valued. He had begun his soldiering in a line regiment: later, with a view to being slightly better paid, exchanging into the Army Service Corps. I used to imagine him wearing a pill-box cap on the side of his head, making assignations under a sub-tropical sun with a beautiful lady dressed in a bustle and sitting in an open carriage driven by a coloured coachman; though such attire, as a matter of fact, belonged to a somewhat earlier period; and, even if circumstances resembled this picture in other respects, the chances were, on the whole, that assignations would be made, and kept, ‘in mufti’.

There had been, in fact, two separate rows, which somehow became entangled together: somebody’s wife, and somebody else’s money: to say nothing of debts. At one stage, so some of his relations alleged, there had even been question of court-martial: not so much to incriminate my unfortunate uncle as to clear his name of some of
the rumours in circulation. The court-martial, perhaps fortunately, was never convened, but the necessity for Uncle Giles to send in his papers was unquestioned. He travelled home by South Africa, arriving in Cape Town a short time before the outbreak of hostilities with the Boers. In that town he made undesirable friends—no doubt also encountering at this period Mrs. Foxe’s father—and engaged in unwise transactions regarding the marketing of diamonds: happily not involving on his part any handling of the stones themselves. This venture ended almost disastrously; and, owing to the attitude taken up by the local authorities, he was unable to settle in Port Elizabeth, where he had once thought of earning a living. However, like most untrustworthy persons, Uncle Giles had the gift of inspiring confidence in a great many people with whom he came in contact. Even those who, to their cost, had known him for years, sometimes found difficulty in estimating the lengths to which he could carry his lack of reliability—and indeed sheer incapacity—in matters of business. When he returned to England he was therefore seldom out of a job, though usually, in his own words, ‘starting at the bottom’ on an ascent from which great things were to be expected.

In 1914 he had tried to get back into the army, but his services were declined for medical reasons by the War Office. Not long after the sinking of the Lusitania he obtained a post in the Ministry of Munitions; later transferring himself to the Ministry of Food, from which he eventually resigned without scandal. When the United States entered the war he contrived to find some sort of a job in the provinces at a depot formed for supplying ‘comforts’ to American troops. He had let it be known that he had made business connexions on the other side of the Atlantic, as a result of this employment. That was why there had been
a suggestion—in which wish may have been father to thought in the minds of his relations—that he might take up a commercial post in Philadelphia. The letter from the Isle of Man, with its hint of impending marriage, seemed to indicate that any idea of emigration, if ever in existence, had been abandoned; whilst references throughout its several pages to ‘lack of influence’ brought matters back to an earlier, and more fundamental, stage in my uncle’s presentation of his affairs.

This business of ‘influence’ was one that played a great part in Uncle Giles’s philosophy of life. It was an article of faith with him that all material advancement in the world was the result of influence, a mysterious attribute with which he invested, to a greater or lesser degree, every human being on earth except himself. That the rich and nobly born automatically enjoyed an easy time of it through influence was, of course, axiomatic; and—as society moved from an older order—anybody who might have claims to be considered, at least outwardly, of the poor and lowly was also included by him among those dowered with this almost magic appanage. In cases such as that of the window-cleaner, or the man who came to read the gas-meter, the advantage enjoyed was accounted to less obvious—but, in fact, superior—opportunity for bettering position in an increasingly egalitarian world.
‘That
door was banged-to for me at birth,’ Uncle Giles used to say (in a phrase that I found, much later, he had lifted from a novel by John Galsworthy) when some plum was mentioned, conceived by him available only to those above, or below, him in the social scale.

It might be imagined that people of the middle sort—people, in other words, like Uncle Giles himself—though he would have been unwilling to admit his attachment to any recognisable social group, could be regarded by him as
substantially in the same boat. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Such persons belonged to the class, above all others, surveyed with misgiving by him, because members of it possessed, almost without exception, either powerful relations who helped them on in an underhand way, or business associations, often formed through less affluent relations, which enabled them—or so he suspected—to buy things cheap. Any mention of the City, or, worse still, the Stock Exchange, drove him to hard words. Moreover, the circumstances of people of this kind were often declared by him to be such that they did not have to ‘keep up the same standards’ in the community as those that tradition imposed upon Uncle Giles himself; and, having thus secured an unfair advantage, they were one and all abhorrent to him.

As a result of this creed he was unconquerably opposed to all established institutions on the grounds that they were entirely—and therefore incapably—administered by persons whose sole claim to consideration was that they could command influence. His own phrase for describing briefly this approach to all social, political and economic questions was ‘being a bit of a radical’: a standpoint he was at pains to make abundantly clear to all with whom he came in contact. As it happened, he always seemed to find people who would put up with him; and, usually, people who would employ him. In fact, at his own level, he must have had more ‘influence’ than most persons. He did not, however, answer the enquiries, and counter-proposals, put forward in a reply to his letter sent to the address in the Isle of Man; and, for the time being, no more was heard of his marriage, or any other of his activities.

Settling down with Templer at school was easier than I had expected. Without Stringham, he was more expansive,
and I began to hear something of his life at home. His father and uncle (the latter of whom—for public services somewhat vaguely specified—had accepted a baronetcy at the hands of Lloyd George, one of the few subjects upon which Templer showed himself at all sensitive) had made their money in cement. Mr. Templer had retired from business fairly recently, after what his son called , ‘an appalling bloomer over steel.’ There were two sisters: Babs, the eldest of the family, who towards the end of the war had left a husband in one of the dragoon regiments in favour of a racing motorist; and Jean, slightly younger than her brother. Their mother had died some years before I came across Templer, who displayed no photographs of his family, so that I knew nothing of their appearance. Although not colossally rich, they were certainly not poor; and whatever lack of appreciation Peter’s father may at one moment have shown regarding predictable fluctuations of his own holdings in the steel industry, he still took a friendly interest in the market; and, by Peter’s account, seemed quite often to guess right. I also knew that they lived in a house by the sea.

‘Personally I wouldn’t mind having a look at Kenya,’ said Templer, when I described the luncheon with Stringham and his mother.

‘Stringham didn’t seem to care for the idea.’