Stop Press (39 page)

The stones had marked Winter – at dinner he had made some effort to be marked. The stones had also approved of him; he had appeared to combine the correct allegiances with an ability to meet the intelligentsia on their own ground, to be in fact what stones regard dons and the higher clergy as paid to be. They read Holme’s joke as an outrage. Class-antagonism in one of its more oblique and uncomfortable forms flooded the obstinately dingy tank of Sir Gervase Eliot.

Patricia was sitting next to the victim of Holme’s pleasantry. She stole a glance at him and saw that she might let it become a frank appraisal. Winter was not amused; but neither was he annoyed, angry, or embarrassed. The life of common-rooms inures to hard knocks – and presumably it had, too, a hardening quality against unexpected onset. ‘Clearly’, said Patricia experimentally, ‘a bit of a mistake. Not these folk’s fodder and it hasn’t gone down at all.’

Winter turned towards her and smiled. ‘How vast the majority of young women whose murmurs would be sympathetic in tone.’

He was improving a little, Patricia thought, in the art of compliment. Nevertheless he spoke as if his mind were on something else. As it indeed plainly was; Winter’s eye had come reluctantly away from Mr Eliot and her brother; he was interested in the core of a situation, not in its accidents even if dramatically directed against himself. ‘I don’t think you at all need sympathy,’ she said.

‘We must reserve our sympathy for our host. It is, as you say, a misfire. In Wing and Cold Findon a neat lampoon is caviare to the general.’ He nodded towards Detleps. ‘And to the colonel too.’ He paused appreciatively over this oddly constructed pun and glanced round the theatre. ‘I wonder how Timmy is taking it? On the whole he seems to bear up well. There’s stuffing in Timmy.’

Even in the face of the obvious benevolence of this Patricia was pleased. But she said dryly, ‘A good dinner, wasn’t it?’

‘It won’t save the situation now.’ Detected in amiability, Winter retreated on malice. ‘The show is dead.
Si monumentum requiris circumspice
.’

‘They do look a bit grim.’

‘And behind the scenes we may take it consternation reigns. I expect Overall is due to recite Wedge’s poem through one of those absurd masks. He’s funking it and feeling sad. And he’s quite right; it would be just another of his professional appearances as a failure. Without Holme’s mocking of that well-bred man from Oxford they’d have taken it. Now they’re bristling with ghastly good taste. There was a sound of revelry by night, but the gathered chivalry of Pigg and Limber thought it low. Lower than Low Swaffham itself.’ Particularly delighted with this childish sally, Winter let his laugh – his well-bred Oxford laugh – float across the uneasily silent theatre

They put on Miss Cavey.
A Haworth Saturday Night
might be not altogether grateful to finical sensibilities, but at least it outraged none but the dead. Miss Cavey, taking upon herself the character of Emily Brontë, created around her by means of ingenious monologue a little world of father, brother, sisters, and dumb friends. This is a species of entertainment which has been successfully achieved once in the recorded history of the stage and it was felt that Miss Cavey deserved great credit for her bold attempt on a difficult variety. It was obvious that she started with distinct physical disadvantages. Emily Brontë could not have been quite so stout on such spare fare as the Rev. Mr Brontë could provide, nor had she the fortune to attain Miss Cavey’s years. This gave all the greater scope for a triumph of spirit over the flesh. Miss Cavey had any amount of spirit. Of those who had qualms only Peter Holme had the resolution to leave; he retired to drinks in the solitude of the library and was not seen again. The stones, many of whom had been persuaded to read
Jane Eyre
at school, were interested and pleased. At the eleventh hour – and it was in fact just past eleven o’clock – the entertainment took on some promise of success. This made the incident of Keeper all the more unfortunate.

Keeper was Emily Brontë’s dog. The climax of Miss Cavey’s presentation was Emily’s courageous confronting of this normally faithful creature when it was supposed to have contracted rabies. Everything else – even the tense scene in which the drunken Branwell was confounded by citations from Anne’s
Tenant of Wildfell Hall
– stood subordinated to this terrific finale.

Emily was advancing upon an imaginary Keeper supposed to be located down stage right. Miss Cavey had talent; the audience was really held; even on Winter’s face Patricia could discern an impressed and attentive horror. It was at this moment that there appeared from the wings down stage left a monstrous and familiar figure. A blob of a nose, a mottled snout, a lachrymose eye, a large mottled drooping ear – the creature is called a Dismal Desmond and is known in every nursery. This Dismal Desmond was enormous. Skilfully manipulated from behind, it advanced on the unconscious Emily with obscene sniffings even as Emily advanced on the invisible Keeper.

Somebody – afterwards maintained by rumour to have been the admirable Toplady – rang down the curtain. A horrid silence – silence all the more horrid for being not quite silence but a trembling void of suppressed mirth – was broken by Lady Bootomley. She summed up the feelings of her contigent in historic words. ‘We are not amused,’ Lady Bootomley said.

Winter learnt across to Patricia. ‘And that’, he murmured, ‘is that. Nothing more appalling can occur.’

He was wrong. By what coup the thing was accomplished remained obscure. But even as he spoke the curtain rose again. Miss Cavey was still on the stage, clearly with no exact notion of what had happened. Dismal Desmond was on the stage too, and he had been joined by three further stuffed canine monstrosities even larger than himself. In the same second that this tableau was disclosed the animals began to rise in the air. Three were noosed in rope; Dismal Desmond was seen to be transfixed by an enormous butcher’s hook; all four were drawn up until they hung suspended about Miss Cavey’s ears.

And then once more the forces of order gained control. The curtain fell for good. It blotted out a stage immobile save for a stream of sawdust which trickled from the ruptured bowels of Dismal Desmond to the floor.

When the post-mortems were held in the drawing-rooms of Wing and Warter and King’s Cleeve Lady Bootomley – who was unpopular in the county anyway – met with a good deal of censure for the extreme course she took. For Lady Bootomley paused to condole with Miss Cavey on the tasteless way in which her beautiful evocation had been destroyed and then, tucking her foot muff under her arm, explained to Belinda why she felt unable to stay to supper. The snow had been heavy, she said, and the horses must be considered. She then got into her car and was driven away.

Most of the stones reacted differently. Richard Eliot, they felt – and stones have a strange power of feeling in a body – had been born in the heart of the quarry; the right thing was to rally round when his queer fish landed him in a mess. So the stones stayed to supper, only showing their perturbation by moving in a compact petrofactive mass and adopting a defensive formation at one end of the dining-room. Into this mass Rupert Eliot vanished – a frank deserter, pale with emotion. Archie Eliot, although already suspected as the technician behind the débacle, moved about as blandly and comfortably as was his wont. The little man André, the secret of whose brown-paper parcels was now clear, had discreetly withdrawn. Timmy, his fears about Henry and Eleanor having proved groundless, was in an access of spirits and had hurled them all into a covert declaration of war against the stones. His chosen weapon was drink; with luck and a sound knowledge of his father’s cellar, he told Patricia, it might be possible to get them all tight yet – the old women first. And that would teach them to sniff at a whiff of intelligent satire.

This pleasingly undiplomatic attitude seemed to be not altogether unsupported by Mr Eliot. Or at least Mr Eliot felt that alcohol in its more rarefied forms might act as a badly needed lubricant. He carried a great deal about himself, with Appleby as a second line of supply close at his elbow. Here and there the elements of ease returned to the party. At least the thing was over. Supper would decently conclude and dispersal would follow.

What followed, however, was the affair – anticlimax or interlude – of Gib Overall. Here the engineer was Archie, who knew much more about the compounding of drinks than Timmy. He had found Overall in gloom, anguished at the sense of a great opportunity lost. Skilfully avoiding a metamorphosis to mere merriment, he had induced the comparatively rare state known as fighting drunk. And then he had pointed out that, after all, it was not too late. Thus it came about that when the company, rallying to the cause of social decency, was endeavouring to put all thought and memory of the theatre away, and when the tonic virtue of Mr Eliot’s wines and the sedative virtue of Mr Eliot’s dining-room were successfully combining to this end, there erupted upon the scene an uproarious figure in a mask – a mask which was distinguishable libel on Mr Wedge – declaiming unintelligible verses interspersed with lucid, simple, and tersely Saxon threats, and finally collapsing on the floor like an animated doll at the conclusion of a ballet. He was removed by Kermode and a resolute stone. In this embarrassing pot-house process the mask fell off and rolled across the floor. The effect of decapitation pointed but did not relieve the grotesqueie of the performance. It was a final blow. The Cavey affair, it was now even possible to feel in the retrospect, had contained some saving element of savage wit. Overall’s effort was unredeemed.

It was at the end of the succeeding shattered ten minutes that Patricia again bumped into Winter – a Winter who was openly troubled for the first time that night. For a second he eyed her speculatively. Then he asked abruptly, ‘Miss Appleby, was that just a decorative flourish?’

Patricia put down a hot concoction which had been brought by Timmy. A sip of it had been driving an uneasy warmth about her body; she now felt a sudden and unaccountable chill. ‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘It strikes me as having had – by design or accident – a structural significance as well.’ Winter’s state was revealed in an odd blend of urgency and pedantry. ‘What Dethleps would call a masking movement. We all goggled at gibbering Gib – and as we goggled our host disappeared.’

Rapidly Patricia scanned the crowded room. ‘John’s gone too.’

Winter nodded. ‘I suppose that makes it all right. Only I rather wish I were gone as well.’

‘My brother can do rough-house when that sort of thing’s needed. I don’t think you need be alarmed.’ Patricia tried the concoction again. It was nauseous. She realized that like Winter she was uneasy beyond the logical needs of the situation. ‘What’s the time?’

Winter produced a sliver of a watch. ‘Five minutes to twelve.’

They looked at each other in silence, unassurred by the knowledge that there were a dozen reasons why Mr Eliot might have left the room. Rupert and Archie were also invisible; Timmy and Belinda were holding the fort together. It was the moment at which the visitors were thinking of taking their leave; several could be seen preparing for this manoeuvre: locating Belinda, endeavouring to locate Mr Eliot. The point was one at which their host should not have made himself invisible. Winter gave this situation one further glance. ‘I think I’ll take a look round,’ he said, and threaded his way to the door.

Patricia, equally restless, edged her way to a window and slipped through thick curtains; after a moment she could see something of the night. The stones would have a fair journey home. The snow had stopped, the sky was clearing and the moon had ridden high: the edge to the terrace before her was merged in the boldly crenellated shadow of Caroline gables. The disused and pitted elm-avenue, the little comedy of the Dutch canal, a segment of the park beyond: all had the slightly bewildering strangeness in which the conjoined novelties of moonlight and snow steep a known and accustomed scene. The moon itself, it occurred to Patricia, was the most familiar – the least disturbing – part of the picture: a domestic effect which might have been a part of the estate, its neighbourliness emphasized by the unwinking remoteness of a planet hard by. It was very still outside. Despite the disintegrating conversation behind her – the burst-out squibs and guttering candle-ends of talk in which the disastrous party was coming to an end – she could hear her pulse counting out the seconds like a soft drum beating far across the snow.

It was midnight.

She turned back into the room and almost ran into Dr Chown, who seemed to have retreated to the window in order to make a detached survey of the scene. He looked at Patricia with severity – rather as if she were a child he had detected in mischief – and said, ‘This is a very extraordinary thing.’

Patricia felt rather than observed what he was talking about. A group of guests was taking leave of Belinda – awkwardly, in the absence of their host. But this was not the point. The party was in the act of swapping anxieties, of turning from the known social stresses of the night to apprehension massive and undefined. It was impossible to tell from what centre the new feeling had spread. Not, Patricia thought, from Mr Eliot’s children: the thing was coming at, not from, Timmy and Belinda. And seconds after she looked it had reached them. Twice Belinda had said as she shook hands, ‘I can’t think what’s become of my father: you may meet him in the hall.’ Now, saying goodbye to the Detleps, she said it again in a tone revealing that the tide had gone over her. There was a startled silence. And – as if the silence had been some potent invocation tonight – darkness descended for the third time on Rust Hall.

Warfare and salesmanship alike discount the notion that familiarity breeds contempt. It is when the quiet sector to which we have been moved proves as active as the one we have left that the line breaks; it is when the eye has idly scanned the slogan a score of times that we name our brand in the shop. This third quenching of the lights was the most effective of all.