Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (46 page)

The smiles on the faces of those who hoped for some mischief from these lectures grew broad. One director pointedly walked out and a shop steward began to talk audibly to his neighbour. Donald paused and blinked at them through his glasses.

'I am not normally in the habit of indulging in homely stories. Nevertheless we have the best authority, that of scripture, for using the simple anecdotal illustration. So I will this evening tell you of a little incident with this very firm which demonstrates most neatly the points I have been trying to make. Christmas,' he said, and he gave an ironic smile, 'has tended, as you know, to change in this country from a feast of deep spiritual significance to a sentimental occasion vaguely suggestive of family good will. My own family is no exception to this prevalent spirit. Last Christmas my brother-in-law, Mr Robin Mid-dleton, your director, had an argument with my other brother-in-law, Mr John Middleton, whom you probably all know well, if only for his remarkable performances on the radio and on television. Now it so happens that the points of view taken up by these two men, both so eminent in their respective fields, coincide very exactly with the two main social philosophies which I have been describing to you. Mr Robin Middleton is the very able defender of the business ethic of free enterprise and open competition. Mr John Middleton is the no less expert standard-bearer of the liberal or radical attempt to palliate or remove the less attractive features of that individualist social order. Your director instanced, as an example of the necessary workings of modern industry, the means which a large firm - Middleton and Company - had been forced to use in order to put out of business an old-fashioned small manufacturer whose obstinacy and inefficiency were holding up the supply of goods. This man - Grimston I think his name was,' he looked up as though in faint surprise at the whispering which had begun in the audience, and continued, 'this Grimston was flooded with orders for various parts which Middletons knew he could not provide in the time allotted to him. In consequence he was forced into liquidation. When your director told us this story, Mr John Middleton immediately attacked the unethical, as he called it, nature of such behaviour' - Donald smiled to himself as he thought that this part of his reporting of the conversation was not entirely fair to John. It represented more what a radical reformer should have felt than what John actually did feel - 'He suggested various social remedies by which such unpleasant actions could be avoided. Mr Robin Middleton liked what he had been forced to do no more than his brother, but he correctly pointed out that it was necessary. If Mr Grimston's old-fashioned obstinacy had been allowed to persist, far more harmful results would have followed. Orders would have been lost, men thrown out of work, England's industrial prosperity weakened for the sake of one man. He argued from the head, Mr John Middleton from the heart. But the point that I wish to make, of course, is that the whole of this controversy could only arise in a system which has no moral foundation. ...' He led the lecture back to its general theme, but he noted with satisfaction that his audience's attention was still riveted upon the homely little illustration he had used.

The story of the Grimston deal travelled rapidly through all grades of Middleton and Company, so that when Robin went to the office next morning he was greeted by very irate co-directors. He sent at once for Donald, but was told that he had not come to the office that morning - he had booked a day's leave some weeks ago. Telephone calls to Donald's home received no reply.

As an immediate result of the little indiscretion, the proposal to employ Mr Pelican was turned down by a large majority vote at the board meeting. It was therefore in no pleasant mood that Robin returned home for Marie Hélène's evening party. He almost thought of telling his wife that he would not be present, but with the collapse of everything else, his relations with her were becoming of paramount importance to him. Anyway, he reflected, he was never expected to play a large part on these occasions, simply to see that the domestic wheels went round without any grinding while Marie Hélène did the talking and entertaining. This time, he decided, the Houdets could take on his job; they'd been at the house now for a fortnight and showed no signs of departing; they could at least do something useful for their keep.

It was hardly a fair judgement of poor Madame Houdet. From the very first she had set herself the task of becoming indispensable to Marie Hélène's housekeeping. The household, it was true, was already run with true French economy, but even so Tante Stéphanie had a great deal of pleasure in discovering odd extravagances or minor acts of waste. In this way, she had soon quarrelled with Marie Hélène's servants, but as they were all either Italian or German, they did not give notice but preferred to skirmish out their days. For Madame Houdet it was simply her old life on a larger scale, and the Hampstead house rang with her bad Italian and worse German as had the villa at Merano. She soon found a Catholic church and a priest or two into whose housekeeping she could pry. Her veil, her smart black, and her make-up became as familiar on the slopes of the Heath as they had on the picturesque Tyrolese walks of Merano. At first she deplored the lack of objects of charity in welfare England, but at the end of a fortnight she met a slightly dotty colonel's wife in the Vale of Health and from her she heard something of the difficulties of the retired and the old. After that, she was entirely content, and retailed to the household in the evening stories of ex-officers unable to leave their rooms for lack of shoes and ex-headmistresses shivering in coalless bed-sitting-rooms. It was not the sort of talk which either Robin or Marie Hélène cared to hear, but with a good deal of courage she made them listen and even on occasion part with money for her objects of charity.

For Marie Hélène,
chère
Tante Stéphanie came as a godsend. She was too frugal by nature to relinquish domestic economy entirely, but for some time she had been finding that housekeeping interfered sadly with her new role as a hostess of culture and elegance. Now she could hand over the keys and know that, if anything, more cupboards than ever would be kept locked from the servants.

Mother and son had both arrived with the fixed determination of not leaving unless and until either of the two women - Marie Hélène or Elvira - who had profited so greatly at their expense, should have paid handsomely to secure their departure. Indeed, the Houdets were hardly in the position to leave, for they had realized most of Stéphanie's little capital and all of Yves' Lagonda to equip themselves suitably for the visit. Madame Houdet had found her niche; Yves' role was a more difficult one. He had determined in advance that there were various possibilities open to him: he would become Marie Hélène's well-paid lover, he would acquire a rewarding sinecure in Robin's firm, he would turn Elvira's sense of guilt into good hard cash or, perhaps, if all then failed, he would become Elvira's well-paid husband. As it seemed likely that all these offers would be made to him, it was only a question of seeing that they were accompanied with the maximum monetary reward.

By the eve of Marie Hélène's party he had been in London for three weeks and he had received no more than his board, two cheques for ten pounds from Robin, one for fifty pounds from Elvira, and three ties from Marie Hélène with the suggestion that they were more suitable for England than the ones he at present sported. If for a moment his vanity had been hurt, he soon found reasons for the delay of his schemes. Marie Hélène, in a moment of cosiness bred of admiration for her aunt's economies over the maids' food, had confided the story of Robin's
affaire
with Elvira. Yves then attributed Elvira's failure to make due restitution of her grandmother's money to her hatred of Marie Hélène. He saw in Robin's neglect of his business abilities the jealousy of a failed lover and husband. The slowness of the women's response to his advances he attributed more generally to the hypocritical climate of the country. He looked to time and continued effort to repair all the omissions. To these schemes he added possible money-making projects connected with spying on Robin and reporting to either his wife or his ex-mistress; and certain pressures that he might apply to Gerald, whose disturbed manner at Merano gave promise of some rewarding secret. Meanwhile he invested his seventy pounds in taking out an elderly, rather tarty stockbroker's widow from Bromley. He had met her on the boat and her conversation suggested that, although she would need playing slowly, she would prove, once landed, to be as comfortable in
rentes
as she was in figure.

Both mother and son regarded the coming
soiree
with awe; but while Tante Stephanie, splendid in black satin and appliqué jet, with one of Mrs Portway's lilac chiffon scarves to cover her
décolletage,
proposed herself a retiring role in seeing that none of the food was eaten by the servants, Yves, superb in midnight-blue
smoking,
a legacy of his Italian widow, saw every opportunity to shine.

He addressed himself aggressively to Robin as they awaited the arrival of the first guests. He was one business tycoon to another. It was not at all what Robin cared for in Marie Hélène's lovely gold-and-white Regency drawing-room, where the arts were intended to exercise a rather genteel, flattened-out,
convenable
supremacy.

'What's your wastage, Middleton?'  Yves asked, and before Robin could inquire the meaning of this somewhat cryptic question, he followed it up with a machine-gun fire of searching business questions intended to flatten Robin out, lay him stone dead with their ruthless drive, their dead-hit punch, their incredible grasp of detail. 'What do your absentee figures show?'  he asked. 'What's your pension load? Have you got a record of your pay-out in widows' benefits? Where's your man-hours production graph taking you? What's your loss in toilet time?'  These and many other questions which had once so depressed him from an American colleague in the air force he now worked off on Robin and, without waiting for a reply, he cried, 'Good God! man, a guy's
got
to ask himself these questions. You need an efficiency expert to give your place the works.' And when Robin looked dejected, he patted him on the elbow. 'That's all right,' he said; 'your worries are over. From today you're going to be lucky. I'm going to save Middletons thousands.'

Marie Hélène, tightly swathed in crimson velvet, her bosom deadly yellow as a Japanese corpse's beneath the fires of her opal necklace, held up her hand in horror. 'No business talk, Yves, please,' she cried. 'You will ruin my
soirée.'
And in hard, flat tones, she said, 'Do you think that Anouilh is
passé
? I find a terrible lack of
esprit
in his last play. I'm afraid he has quite lost his elegance.' She gave it to him as a copy-book model for the evening.

Yves looked her over.
'Mais tu es ravissante, ma chère cousine,'
he said,
'absolument ravissante.'
He took her hand and, raising her arm, he planted small kisses all the way up its scrawny, yellow inner side. Marie Hélène had only just time to snatch her arm away before the first guests were announced.

Thick and fast they came, filling the Hampstead double drawing-room, covering the gold-and-white couches, sitting bolt upright on the little Empire chairs, staring over each other's shoulders into the gilt mirrors, leaning on the two unused harpsichords and the hardly used grand piano, threatening the bad Sèvres with their elbows, swallowing quantities of champagne, gobbling up lobster patties and
vol-au-vents
from Fortnums, debouching in elegant pairs into the little garden with its walnut tree and its iris pool.

The more cultured of Robin's business friends were impressed by the representatives of British Council and Arts Council and Institut Français and a hundred other councils and institutes; all these bureaucrats of modern culture were equally impressed by the business friends; and everybody was impressed by the odd French or English poet or sculptor or violinist. Dotted among them here and there were B.B.C. officials - programme-planners, features-producers, poetry readers - and an odd publisher or two; these had a professional appearance of not being very impressed. Only perhaps Mrs Jevington, at once wife of a wealthy barrister and an 'interesting' sculptress in her own right, floated about in a haze of impressing and being impressed until she was silly with conflicting emotions. But impressed or impressing, everybody was superbly flat and dead; even when they had drunk a great deal of champagne and had begun to cut the air with that peculiar harsh sound of cultural voices - English, French, competent English-French, and grotesquely incompetent French-English - raised in conversation competition, they never betrayed themselves into saying anything that could possibly mar the tedious triviality with which they clothed serious subjects or the deadly heaviness with which they discussed the trivial. Marie Hélène's bony shoulders quivered with the success of it all.

Gerald, on arrival, edged towards the french windows to get some air, but Madame Houdet, seeing him alone, thought, Ah! the poor man, he's old and knows no one, and, as there was a lull for a moment in her surveillance of the servants, she came over to him. 'Ah! you are sad, Mr Middleton,' she said; 'you are thinking of your dear Lilian.' Whereas Yves had attached the most dubious motives to Gerald's visit to Merano, his mother had ascribed it to the flickering embers of an old romance.

Gerald started. He had been watching young Caroline Jevington talking to Timothy and admiring his grandson's taste. A little unripe yet, he was thinking, but she would develop; already she showed none of that ugly, flat-breasted boyish nonsense that spoiled too many of these girls. Oh Lord! he thought, as Madame Houdet talked, what a dirty old man I'm getting to be, but, looking at the dead-pan faces of Marie Hélène's guests, he added, and thank God for it!

'Poor Lilian! she found it hard to die.
Mon dieu! comme elle a lutté!
She loved the world so much. She would not give up fighting for life. No, never! You and I, we are different, Mr Middleton; we are willing to be old, we are ready to go.'