Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (10 page)

There was nothing she could do though, she decided.

'I mustn't keep Larwood waiting too long,' said Gerald. 'He's taking us down, but I've told him he can come back tonight for his family Christmas. Robin'll have his car if we need one. Anything that'll save us from your mother's driving.'

'I could have run you down,' said John, 'if I'd known it was inconvenient for Larwood.'

'You drive too fast,' said Gerald; 'anyway, Larwood's paid for some inconvenience. Goodbye, Miss Portway; I shall be sad if we don't meet again.'

'I'm sure we
shall,'
said Elvira, taking his hand.

When the two men were safely out of the office, she picked up the telephone and dialled.

'Mr Middleton, please,' she said. And a minute later, 'Robin, darling? I've told Johnnie. Yes, he will, I'm sure. Well - I only managed it by being bloody nasty really. He'll be all right when he's thought up reasons to give his friends, only he's done such an act about my being with him for ever that it's a bit difficult. No, not really. A bit sharp, but that was all. He couldn't say much because your father was there. No, I thought he was enchanting. Just like you. Well, not really like you, because he has a moustache and is older, but awfully sweet. I told you. I'm going to a sort of party. No, of course not, it'll be hell without you. Oh! I know you have to go there. Anyway, it's part of the way we have to go on. No, no, darling, I just
said
"have to"; I didn't mean it. Well, as long as you don't enjoy yourself too much or forget me for a minute. And don't be nasty to your father. Well, as a matter of fact I have taken a fancy to him. He's much nicer than any of the rest of your family. Well, not perhaps than Johnnie, but less embarrassing, anyway. No, darling, I'm not really depressed. I'm like that at Christmas anyway, even without all this business of your having to go down to Marlow. I should think your mother must be awful at Christmas. Oh! not especially. I don't like
any
old women much, as you know. No, darling, I will. Anyway it's only until Tuesday. I only hope I shan't have that pain I had the last time you went away. Well, you ought to be flattered really, but I do see that you wouldn't be. Goodbye, darling; I'd like to say dream of me, like that girl in the dairy, only it sounds rather dirty.'

Elvira put down the telephone and stared into the ashtray. Her feelings for Robin were not at all intellectual.

Robin Middleton ran up the stairs of his large Hampstead home like a schoolboy after talking to Elvira. Then, outside the bedroom, the depression of reality slowed his step. His wife Marie Hélène was packing his dressing-case as he came into the room.

She was in an ostentatiously calm and efficient mood that allowed her to exercise all the tyranny of fussing without being accused of it.

'That was Elvira,' said Robin, who used sincerity to his wife as his only protest against her existence.

'Yes?'  said Marie Hélène, and going to the door of the bedroom she called across the corridor, 'Timothy, stop reading and get on with your packing.' As a good Catholic, she remained an excellent wife to Robin without condoning a moment of his adultery.

Timothy appeared at the door, already at sixteen nearly six foot, trying by excessive neatness to disguise his gangling figure. He blinked through his steel-rimmed glasses and said, 'The packing's done,' and went back to his book. Robin laughed affectionately. He was sure of his son's love, but suspected that his respect went with community of religion to his mother.

Marie Hélène said, 'His manners want so much improvement.' She spoke the word 'manners' with the reverence she felt for it. 'I've bought your mother's
present,'
she went on. Her English was nearly faultless, but she pronounced certain words like 'present' in italics as though she thought they were slang words. In fact, she had a belief that such words were 'popular speech' and that it was distinguished to use them. The dictionary word was 'gift', but its use would have been bourgeois. She was herself of rich
petit-bourgeois
Lyonnais origin and much possessed by it. 'Do you want to see it?'  she added. But when Robin said 'Yes', she merely sat down on one of the upturned suitcases. 'Do you think that this year your mother will make a scene when Timothy and I go into Henley for Midnight Mass?'

'No,' said Robin; 'I think you put an end to Mother's protests against Mass last year.'

He noticed his wife's full olive-green wool skirt billowing around her feet and shivered. She always seemed to wear dead greens or purples that, with her sallow, distinguished camel's face, filled the room with cold. It was true that even in this centrally heated room, offering such warmth against the bitter air outside, Marie Hélène's tall, unbending figure suggested the funereal, shuttered cool of a meridional house in the glare of summer's heat.

'I have put in a pair of your stout walking shoes,' she said; 'your father likes to take a walk on Boxing Day.'

'Oh! Don't let us encourage him,' said Robin; 'that walk always upsets Mother's Christmas arrangements and she hates it.'

'Yes,' said Marie Hélène, agreeing, and then added, 'but the arrangements, after all, are for her husband. If he doesn't like them...'

Robin laughed. 'You know very well Mother never arranges anything for Father, only for her children.'

Marie Hélène did not accept a humorous approach to such matters. 'Then the arrangements are not serious,' she said.

She had no compassion for her mother-in-law's role as a wronged wife, when it sprang from such derelictions of wifely duty. Her own similar position had no element of justice in its cause, only Robin's indulgence of lust.

'Tante Stéphanie has sent Timothy a leather wallet for Christmas,' she told Robin. 'It is quite hideous Tyrolese peasant work, but he seems to like it.'

'I can't think why she's so generous,' said Robin, 'after that lawsuit. If I were Madame Houdet I'd never speak to us again.'

'She's my aunt,' said Marie Hélène. 'Because she took a stupid law case against me for money to which she had no right and lost it, does not make her lose her sense of what is correct.'

Robin smiled. 'I wish she'd won it. I can't think why she
didn't
in a French court.'

Marie Hélène laughed. It was a loud, satisfying sound when it came, which was rarely. 'My dear Robin, you are not quite so English as that. Fortunately French courts are not like the English picture. They are just.'

'All the same,' said Robin, his handsome, dark face frowning at the prospect of an unpalatable truth. 'After she'd been in Auschwitz and had come back to find the lawyer had tricked her of all her money ...'

'He committed suicide,' said Marie Hélène with a grimace of horror and disgust. Then, with â look of reverence, she went on: 'Tante Stéphanie is a very courageous woman. She refused the money we offered.'

'Well, I can't say I blame' her
after
we'd defeated her in the lawsuit.'

'I said she is courageous. Of course, she could not accept, but we were right to offer.'

'I see,' said Robin.

'In any case,' Marie Hélène remarked, 'she will be well paid by that old Mrs Portway. Tante Stéphanie is not a fool about such things. No doubt she will get the old lady's money when she dies.'

Robin winced. 'I hope Elvira doesn't mind too much,' he said.

'Why should she mind?'  his wife asked. 'She recognizes no duty to Mrs Portway, she should expect no reward. Of course, the old lady will leave her a legacy, since she is her granddaughter.'

'French law would demand a little more than that,' Robin laughed.

'French logic sometimes falls into English sentimentality,' observed Marie Hélène, with the smile she kept for wit. 'Tante Stéphanie writes to me that Yves will come to London this summer. I have written that he will be our guest.'

'Good heavens!' said her husband, 'he's a monster, or, at least, you've painted him as such.'

'I
don't like him,' said Marie Hélène, 'but he's my cousin.'

Once again Robin could only say, 'I see.' He added, 'I hope I shall be able to entertain him.'

'You are a wonderful host, darling,' said his wife with absolute sincerity. Save for his sentimentality, of which she regarded his infidelity as a by-product, Marie Hélène thought her husband perfection.

Robin began to change into a heavy tweed suit. 'I hope I shan't have a row with John about this business of poor old Pelican,' he said, folding his discarded trousers with obsessive precision. 'It's quite intolerable that he should write all that nonsense in the paper about one of the few thoroughly competent civil servants the country's got. The firm's dealt with Pelican ever since '41 and I've never known a more sensible and useful person. Just because this Cressett - probably some small dealer who's incompetent to run a whelk-stall - complains of an injustice, John starts a public pillorying of a man whose position forbids him to answer back. If Pelican has made a mistake, it's not surprising, with all the work his Ministry carries. It's typical of politicians and journalists; they want a state-run country and they're ready to employ thousands of bureaucrats at our expense to do it, but when one of their employees really
can
administer, they turn on him. All this self-publicizing sentimentality about individual cases when the country's fighting for its life makes me absolutely sick. Especially that it should be my brother. No business man would dare to be so irresponsible.' Robin as a business man was neither old-fashioned, individualistic, nor sentimental.

'John is a fool,' said Marie Hélène. 'But I don't think you should take up a stranger's cause against your family.'

'I take up the cause of the logic that stares anyone in the face who knows what the economic needs of this country are,' Robin said defiantly. He heard the note of pomposity in his own voice that always accompanied anger and calmed himself by brushing his tweed suit very meticulously. 'Well, there's one piece of family piety that I'm thinking of letting the firm in for which should please you,' he said.

He looked expectantly at Marie Hélène, but she dilated her camel's nostrils slightly and said, 'I do not give blank cheques.' It was one of her favourite English phrases; the very enormity of so prodigal a behaviour fascinated her.

'It's Donald,' he said. 'He's failed for these University posts again.'

Marie Hélène smiled - a look that matched her somewhat frostbitten mouth. 'I am sorry,' she said, 'but perhaps he is not so brilliant as Kay thinks him. Not everyone can be a university lecturer.' For Marie Hélène, to be
agrégé
was quite something.

'Oh, he's brilliant all right,' said Robin. His brother-in-law was a luxury that the family paid for. He never cared for his purchases to be depreciated. 'But he obviously gets off on the wrong foot with his colleagues. Kay, bless her heart, is worried about their taking so much family money and her husband earning nothing. Mother wrote to me all about it and asked if I could find him something to do. Of course, he's a bit up in the clouds. All this Anglo-Catholicism makes him think we can put the clock back, but there's a tough core of common sense there, all the same. A lot of it is bitterness over not getting the posts. That's why I want to do what I can. As I told Mother, there's no need for Kay to get a conscience, she's entitled to the interest on her dividends as much as anyone else.' He looked to his wife for confirmation of his beloved sister's rights but none was forthcoming. 'Anyhow, I've agreed to give him something to do while he's waiting about. As a matter of fact, these evening lectures at the works have been a great success, despite all the jeremiads I was treated to when I started them. Even some of my dear brother directors have changed their tune, and the union bosses are quite enthusiastic now. Up to now, of course, they've been largely technical, but I don't see why we shouldn't include a bit of training for citizenship, so I'm going to get Donald to do a series on current affairs. A few of his utterances are liable to make our union chaps cry blue murder, but as long as he's kept in check, it won't do any harm for them to be made to think a little beyond their mental horizon of the Depression and watered-down Fabianism.'

Marie Hélène began to put on her hat before the dressing-table mirror. As she talked, she did not turn, but watched her husband. 'One must never be foolish about business,' she said.

Robin looked annoyed. 'After all, he is my brother-in-law,' he threw back at her.

She saw the force of this. 'You are probably right,' she said. 'In any case, these lectures are nice, but hardly important.' Commerce was commerce to her, not a matter for 'frills '.

As she moved to get her gloves, Timothy appeared in the doorway. 'If we don't hurry up we shall be late. It's after half past six,' he said in a self-satisfied voice. He had finished his book.

It was Robin's turn now to be annoyed with what he felt to be the boy's priggishness. Marie Hélène, however, was always just in her dealings with her son. 'You are right,' she said with a smile. 'I am glad that you are learning to be prompt. That is very important.'

Lilian Portway, Elvira's grandmother, walked with a stick; for all else, with her graceful, willowy figure, she might have been forty rather than seventy. She moved with firm strides through the crisp snow, throwing back observations in her commanding, low-timbred voice to little Stéphanie Houdet, who came panting behind with the laden shopping-baskets.

'They've done nothing, literally nothing, about my bandstand,' she said in the voice of tragedy. 'I shall see the mayor, Stéphanie, and tell him that they won't get a penny more of my money until they've painted my bandstand. Gold,' she said dramatically, 'a deep red-gold and black. I shall give them a lake with black swans and twenty tubs of agapanthus lilies.'

'But my dear Lilian' - Stéphanie Houdet, unlike her niece Marie Hélène, spoke English with the most uncompromising French accent - 'no one will come any more to this part of the town. It is quite finished.'

Indeed, the broken-down baroque bandstand, which stood - a relic of Hapsburg glory - in the neglected little garden, seemed almost to have ceased to pretend to be more than a ruin.