So Well Remembered (34 page)

After he had gone there was a change of atmosphere that became almost
baleful; it had been tense before, but now it was menacing, a curious
hostility between Jeffrey and Livia that was due, I could not help feeling,
to my own presence. A sort of invisible cat crouching on the table-top to
spring at any of our throats at an unknown signal—if the metaphor isn’t
too far-fetched. In an attempt to ease the conversation into some harmless
groove I said, unimportantly: “It’s probably not a good day to sight-see, but
I did at least get a good whiff of Ireland as I drove over.”

Livia answered, as if she must dispute with me at all costs: “It IS a good
day to sight-see. Ireland’s a sad country, so you see it best when it looks
sad, but the sadness is alive—it comes out of the earth—it isn’t
like the dead sadness of London, especially the West End.”

“Oh, come now,” I said facetiously. “The Café Royal at midnight hasn’t got
much dead sadness.”

“Jeff and I love it here,” she went on defensively, as if I had ever
denied it. “That is, he could if he wanted to,” she added, as if Jeffrey had
ever denied it.

“But what do you do all the time?” I asked, still facetiously.

“Livy looks after the farm,” Jeffrey answered. “She likes that sort of
work, though it’s not very good land—far too stony, and the gales come
in full of salt spray that sours the soil… I’ll take you round
tomorrow.”

“Mr. Millbay won’t have time,” Livia said pointedly. “He’s got to leave
for Limerick tomorrow.” She added: “Jeffrey’s busy too. He has to write his
book.”

“If he can,” Jeffrey commented, with a note of ruefulness.

“He doesn’t concentrate enough,” she countered. They were both talking at
each other, it seemed, with me as a needed yet somehow exacerbating
audience.

The question of the book raised Jeffrey a notch higher in whatever emotion
was being generated between them. “Livy,” he said, “appears to think that
writing is just a simple matter of one page after another.”

“Well, isn’t it?” Livia asked, appealing to me.

I tried to lower the tension by asking Jeffrey how far the book had
progressed.

Livia answered for him: “About a hundred pages, and it ought to be easy
for him to finish because it’s all about Far Eastern affairs that he’s an
expert on.”

Jeffrey said, still in the same mood of self-scarifying irony: “Livy
thinks that with a record like mine people will be eager to accept me as an
authority.”

I gathered that this had been argued between them before, since Livia
retorted: “What does his record have to do with what he writes?… That’s
what I always ask him.”

Jeffrey nodded. “Yes, that’s what she always asks me, and I think the
answer is rather obvious. Wouldn’t you say so, Millbay?”

I didn’t want to get into such an argument, so I said nothing.

Livia went on, as if even my silence irritated her: “And what OF his
record, anyway? Who bothers about it except a few people in the
Government?”

Jeffrey answered, heavily: “I think Charlie would bother about it if he
knew—and perhaps he does know, or can guess.”

“Charlie has no right to be ashamed of his father,” Livia retorted, and
then she added astoundingly: “My father spent twelve years in jail and
I
wasn’t ashamed of HIM.”

I hadn’t known about that, and made up my mind to look into the matter
when I got back to London. And of course I afterwards found who her father
had been. But in the meantime I felt I had to be honest and side with Jeffrey
about the book. He was undoubtedly right, and his Far Eastern opus, however
good, might well fall under the curse of Kemalpan—the more so since, if
it were very good indeed, it might even attract publicity to what would
otherwise have been ignored or forgotten. I didn’t bring up that point, but
my general support of Jeffrey’s attitude led to what I had feared—and
that was the whole Kemalpan issue spouting up like a volcano. Jeffrey
muttered gloomily that he wondered if it were worth while even to finish the
book at all, what he really wanted was a job, something he could work at to
prove himself more than a failure and an idler. A job, a job… to get away
from the everlasting western gales and the stony soured soil and the clouds
dripping over the mountain and nothing to do… nothing to do…

I could feel the tension mounting now like a physical wave through the
shadows, and again to ease it I said: “You know, Jeffrey, there ARE jobs, if
you really want one. It wouldn’t have to be in Government service. Your Far
Eastern experience would be a bargain for a good commercial firm, and it’s
true, as you know, that a man can serve his country in, say, British-American
Tobacco quite as valuably as in an embassy.”

I saw his eyes light up at that. “Do you think they’d even consider
me?”

But then a strange and disconcerting thing happened. Livia got up from her
chair and leaned across the table towards us with a gleam in her eyes that
was of a very different kind. It gave her face a rather frightening radiance,
emphasizing the curious profile of nose and forehead as she stared down at us
like, I thought, the figurehead of a ship about to dive into a storm. “He’s
not going!” she screamed, in a wild angry whisper. “He must stay HERE. This
is the place for him… ALWAYS…”

After that there was little I could say. The scene subsided, leaving us to
stammer a few commonplaces about this and that; Livia seemed to realize she
had said too much, or had somehow been caught off-guard.

We adjourned to the drawing-room and sat up, the three of us, till it
became clear that Jeffrey wanted to talk to me alone if there were any
chance. Towards midnight I began yawning, to bring the thing to an issue, and
Livia said it was time we all went to bed; whereupon Jeffrey announced that
he and I would stay up and chat for a while. He said that with an air of
challenge, and there was nothing much she could do about it except leave us
together. Such a small victory, and yet, from his whole attitude, I gathered
it was both a narrow and a crucial one.

When we were alone he asked me again about the possibility of a commercial
job—had I meant what I said—did I really think there was a chance
of it?—Certainly, I answered, if that was what he really wanted, and I
offered there and then to put in a good word for him. But the imminence of
something practical and decisive seemed to reverse his mood and deflate his
eagerness, so that I told him to think it over carefully; maybe he didn’t
want to go as much as he thought he did. He answered, far TOO carefully: “I’d
go like a shot but for Livy.”

Then he lapsed into a mumble of pitiful things about her—almost as
if he had learned most of them by heart and were repeating them as much for
his own benefit as for mine. She would be dead against his going abroad
again; she had spent ten years in Malaya and that was understandably as much
as she wanted; she loved Ireland and the farm; she worked so hard, was so
good to him, they really got on all right together despite occasional
bickerings… and so on.

And of course, knowing what I did, it antagonized me to the point of
saying: “So you really mean you’ll stay here for the rest of your life just
to please her?”

He answered: “Perhaps I ought to stay here. After all, she’s been very
decent about the whole thing. The Kemalpan business, I mean. She’s never
reproached me about it.”

That did the trick. Accustomed as I am to the severest verbal self-
discipline I simply couldn’t keep back my answer. “By God,” I exclaimed, “she
damn well oughtn’t to, since she was the whole cause of it herself!”

Then I told him what I hadn’t promised Livia not to tell him, though I
should have broken that promise anyway.

Of course he was appalled. He wouldn’t believe it at first, even when I
said I had documents, depositions, and so on, that I could send or show him
later. “Besides,” I said, “she confessed to it even before there was proof.”
That appalled him also, and I had to tell him about her visit to my office.
When he still seemed unable or unwilling to grasp the situation, I said: “You
mean you don’t think she’s capable of it?”

He answered heavily: “She’s capable of anything.” And then he went on with
a touch of anger: “Why did you tell me? Do you want me to think badly of her?
After all, though what she did was quite dreadful, it only shows how much she
loves me… in her way.”

“Certainly, if you think so,” I answered. “She shows she loves you by
ruining your career—to say nothing of sacrificing the lives of five
strangers. I didn’t intend to say all this when I came here, and I admit I
acted on impulse in doing so, but now I’m rather glad I did.” I thought it
was a good moment then to say good-night and tell him I’d be leaving in the
morning early. “Perhaps there’s somewhere in the village I can hire a car to
take me on to Limerick…” He said there was, and pulled himself together
enough to telephone about it. Then he took me up to my room. At the door we
shook hands and I repeated my offer to try to find him a commercial job if he
wanted one. I also said that in any case I hoped he’d give me a ring if ever
he were in London.

I slept badly and got up soon after dawn. The mists were over the mountain
and a gale from the sea was already tearing them to shreds. I did not think
Carrigole was a place I should like to stay in for long, much less to live in
altogether. There was something elemental and primitive about it that would
get on my nerves unless I could become elemental and primitive myself.

The car had already arrived and stood in the lane beyond the garden, but
as I was crossing the latter from the house I saw Livia hurrying towards me
from a side gate. She was dressed in a sort of waterproof smock, tied loosely
at the waist; her head was almost hidden behind a low-brimmed sou-wester, and
she wore also knee-high boots caked with mud. I don’t know why I remember
such things, except that I was aware of a curious half-hypnotized tension
that made me stir my mind over details to keep it from somehow freezing at
her approach.

I was prepared for a scene, but there was none. “So you’re going now?” she
greeted me.

I said I had thought it better to leave early, so as to reach Limerick by
midday.

“Why, yes, of course. Much better. I’m always up like this. There’s so
much to be done on a farm.”

I said I was sure she was kept very busy.

“Of course Jeff’s still asleep,” she went on. “Nine’s early enough for him
to start writing, don’t you think?” And then, with a bright smile: “What time
would YOU begin writing if you were a writer?”

I answered, smiling back: “Any time I damn well felt like it—and I
speak with authority because I AM a writer.” She didn’t seem to take offence
—and yet I knew, from something in her eyes, that Jeffrey had told her
I had told him everything, and that she hated me for it. And I had a feeling
that to be hated by Livia Winslow was no mild experience.

She accompanied me to the car. “Jeff is really happy here,” she said, as
if I were again denying the fact. “And no wonder, is it?” And then she added,
in a phrase I remember because I wasn’t quite sure what it meant: “When I
first saw this place I thought I had found where I was born in another
world…”

So I finished my Irish holiday and returned to London with such thoughts
about the Winslows as you can imagine. Some months later Jeffrey rang me up
at my office, the tone of his voice conveying a certain urgency, but also, I
thought, a very welcome quality of decision. He sounded like a man who had
finally yet in a sense firmly reached the end of his tether. We lunched at my
club, and afterwards he asked if my offer to aid him in finding a job still
held.

Not only it did, I told him, but it so happened that a few days before I
had mentioned his name to a friend in one of the big oil companies, and the
reaction had been distinctly favourable. “Only I didn’t know whether you’d
changed your mind, so I hardly cared to approach you about it.”

“I’ll take the job whatever it is,” he said. “Where do I go and when can I
start?”

“Look here,” I answered, “I don’t own the company. You’ll have to fix all
that yourself—but if you like I can telephone my friend this afternoon
and let him know you’re in town. I should imagine, from the way he talked,
that it would be something fairly immediate, and he did also tell me where it
was… Hong Kong… How does that suit? You speak Cantonese?”

He said he did.

“They’ll probably jump at you then.”

He seemed so relieved that I told him how glad I was to see him in such a
different mood from the last time we had talked.

“Yes,” he said. “You can call it that if you like—a different
mood.”

I asked him what had happened to make the change, and then he told me
something so extraordinary that if I hadn’t known enough about Livia
beforehand I should have disbelieved it, or him, or both of them, and even
now I’m not a hundred per cent certain. It seemed that after my one-night
visit they had had many arguments about his taking another job abroad, Livia
becoming more and more obstinate in her insistence that he should stay at
Carrigole. It was almost as if she had some obsession about the place—
and perhaps, for that matter, she had. Most of her ideas were obsessions,
anyhow, just as most of her affections were passions—she did nothing by
halves. In such an atmosphere as had developed between them Jeffrey found it
impossible to write his book and presently did not even wish to; what he
craved was a job, and that too was for him an obsession. Their disagreements
had culminated, he said, in an angry scene in which she accused him of
pretending to want the job when what he really wanted was to leave her; this
he denied emphatically, but in the very act of doing so caught himself
wondering if it were half true. And then she staged an astonishing climax.
She told him she would never leave him, that she loved him too much, that
wherever he went she would follow, and that rather than lose him she would
kill anyone who stood in the way of their life together. He took that for
melodrama till she added, with a terrifying sort of casualness: “I did that
once, you know.”