The Cardboard Crown (11 page)

‘I don’t believe that Austin would ever have done it off his own bat,’ he said. ‘People don’t realise what Hetty was like. She may be an intimidating old woman, but as a girl she was terrifying. If you danced with her you felt that you were being dragged into the womb of the eternal mother. And that was if she didn’t care a fig for you. If she was determined to have you she must have been irresistible, not because of her charm but because of some super female magnet with which the Almighty had fitted her. Austin hadn’t a hope. How the devil they managed it on that little sailing ship I can’t imagine. They may have got into a lifeboat of course,’ he said pensively. Here Arthur forgot that he was describing events which had cost him life-long unhappiness, and gave himself up to speculating as to how the actual seduction might have been performed. Some of his conjectures were funny but not printable. Suddenly his indignation overcame him.

‘And all the time,’ he exclaimed, ‘Alice was lying sick in her cabin, a bride of six months, carrying her first child. And that beast …’ He stopped with a slight gasp. ‘If Alice had discovered it then I think it would have killed her. I believe that she did find out, many years later, and she was never quite the same again. I only hope that she didn’t discover all the details, how soon it had begun. I never knew how much she knew. I could only admire the way she behaved when she did find out. Your grandmother was practically faultless, and yet she never condemned anyone. It may have been because of her own mother. I don’t know—but she was so kind …’

Again Arthur stopped and caught his breath. Whenever he heard of innocent suffering, or of any injustice he was powerless to remedy, he found it difficult not to cry, and he had to stop speaking for a moment. This is a characteristic of many Langtons. They could not bear to think of people suffering. In Dominic this trait, fortified by Byngham vigour and Teba passion, became a searing anguish. Sir William could only bring himself to sentence a man to death by concentrating his thoughts on the murderer’s victim. Arthur himself used to perform quixotic acts of charity in wretched povertystricken homes. To the astonishment of his relatives there turned up at the funeral of this witty, malicious and self-indulgent aesthete, a crowd of indigent working-class people whom he had from time to time befriended.

‘Well,’ he went on, ‘one may understand Austin’s succumbing on the ship because of the sea air and Hetty’s snatching him into a lifeboat every night after dinner, but I’m jiggered if I know how he could keep it up all those years. He must have been afraid of her. In fact he told me he was. Then
she found that she was going to have a child. That was a couple of weeks before they reached Plymouth. She set to work rapidly in another direction and grabbed Percy Dell as a form of insurance. You’d think that would sicken Austin for ever, as he was naturally as straightforward as it’s possible to be. In spite of Percy Dell, she still wanted to get Austin, wanted him to clear out with her. She made several attempts before she finally married Dell. She persuaded her uncle Mayhew to take her up to London to a lecture by Thackeray. She then pretended to be unwell and went to bed in the hotel. The Mayhews went off to hear Thackeray and she sent a message to Austin, who she knew would be in London on that night, to come round to her. She tried like blazes to make him clear off with her then and there, and threatened to tell everybody and force Alice to divorce him. He said that he’d tell Alice everything himself, and that she wouldn’t divorce him. She couldn’t anyhow unless he abandoned her. That was the only thing that held Hetty back. She wasn’t sure that Alice wouldn’t forgive him. She contented herself for the time being with raping him in the hotel bedroom. You see, he didn’t really like her, but he couldn’t resist her vile body.’

I had tried to lead Arthur back to the point he was at on that evening when Cousin Hetty telephoned, but I was hearing more than I had bargained for. I was half fascinated, but really thought it would be better if the knowledge of these ancient scandals were to die with the last of the generation to which they belonged. But Arthur was in his stride. It was evident that he knew much more than he had originally admitted. When he first spoke to me on this subject, he pretended that various fictions were true, that
Percy Dell for example, was the father of all Hetty’s sons. Bit by bit he had revealed a little more, like an Oriental dancer discarding her numerous veils, until this evening I was to see truth uncovered.

‘It’s a pity,’ he said, ‘that Austin didn’t go back to Waterpark the next morning and make a clean breast of it to Alice. If he had all the horrible business of the next ten years would not have happened. Those so-called Dells would never have been born.’ He paused, and twisted his wineglass. ‘It’s odd, you know,’ he reflected, ‘that though their origin is scandalous, those boys have done very well. One can hardly say it would have been a good thing if they hadn’t been born.’

It was true that if the Dells had not existed the importance of our clan would have been diminished. Except for Arthur’s brother Walter who became a High Court judge, they were our most prominent, wealthy and successful relatives. Hetty, never forgetting that she was the daughter of a dean, sent two of them into the Church. One became Bishop of Yackandandah, and the other an archdeacon. Her third son made a fortune on the Stock Exchange and had a fashionable wife and a mansion in Toorak. The fourth became a General in the 1914 War, was knighted and actually killed in battle. His statue stands in the St Kilda Road. It is annoying when we pass this only to be able to say: ‘That is our cousin’—when he was really our uncle, but like Sir Launcelot’s, our honour rooted in dishonour stands. Arthur seemed puzzled by these considerations and reluctant to continue, but then he said:

‘Even if good does come out of evil, it doesn’t justify the evil.’ Having reassured himself, he again took up his story.
‘The next shot Hetty made at him was ten minutes before her wedding. Austin had to give her away as Papa was ill. He tried to get out of it, as it was too appropriate to be decent, though there was no-one he would have more gladly given away, to the devil himself, if necessary. In fact he would rather have given her to the devil. To bestow someone on a piece of protoplasm doesn’t guarantee that you’re rid of her. He and Hetty were the last to leave the vicarage at Datchet for the church. She had arranged that. She came downstairs all orange blossom and white lace and again asked him to go off with her at that very moment. Her clothes were packed for going away. It wouldn’t take her a minute to change her dress. They only had to drive to the train instead of to the church, where her miserable piece of jelly was already waiting at the altar. Austin must have felt like death, but he wouldn’t go. She flung her arms round his neck and crushed all her white satin. When he told her she was ruining her wedding dress she moaned: “I am only a bride for you.” She had a deep moaning voice when she was young, but it was by no means weak.

‘Austin got her to the church and gave her away, a bit crumpled in body and soul. When she drove off after the wedding reception, I bet he mopped his forehead. A few days later, at Waterpark, he heard that they’d gone to Switzerland to live, and he thought a squalid incident was closed, but he mistook Hetty, and what was worse, he mistook himself.

‘At that time Papa was very ill, and in the spring he died in Rome. Mama was there alone and Austin had to go out there and settle things up and bring her home to England. If you’re in Rome you might go and look at Papa’s grave in the Protestant Cemetery and see whether it’s kept decently.
It’s just on the left as you go in, up towards Shelley’s.’

‘I’ve seen it,’ I said, ‘when we went to Italy before the war. One of the Tunstalls is buried quite close to it. It’s rather a coincidence, two people from Frome, buried so close together.’

‘I know,’ said Arthur crossly, ‘it’s Aubrey Tunstall, my brother-in-law.’

I thought I had made some kind of gaffe, but was not sure what. Was Arthur annoyed at my referring even so indirectly to his unfortunate marriage? Or was he cross because I affected to know more than he did about his grand connections, his honour again like Sir Launcelot’s? Or were his feelings identical with mine when Julian spoke with detachment about my grandparents? I remember thinking old people were difficult, and now probably Julian thinks just the same of me.

‘Anyhow,’ said Arthur, ‘it was not much out of Austin’s way to stop at Zurich where Hetty and Dell were living, and where she was nursing her baby, and Austin’s of course, a few weeks old. Austin was only about twenty-two, the age at which people are most apt to get into scrapes. They have the judgment of a boy and the feelings of a man. He wanted to see his other child. He was proud that he had achieved two extensions of his personality in such a short time. I don’t know why. Any idiot can reproduce himself.’

Arthur paused again. This was probably the first time that he had related this story in full to anyone, and as he did so new aspects of it occured to him, and he found that now in his old age he did not quite hold the views he had thought he held.

‘And yet,’ he went on more thoughtfully, ‘it is perhaps right to be proud of fulfilling the natural law, to be a healthy part of the design of nature. However …’, his inborn levity returned, ‘you don’t want to overdo it. Austin had some of the instincts of a sultan. At Zurich he found Hetty looking the picture of animal health, the eternal lioness with her young, a bouncing boy who could no more have been premature than Henry VIII. Austin’s pride was a good deal damped by Percy Dell, who though I had always called him the protoplasm, wasn’t even that, poor wretch. He was bursting with sniggering paternal pride. He nudged Austin in a sort of “we fathers” manner. The worst thing Austin had to endure in his life was to hear his own children talked about, criticised, laughed at, or even praised as if they were another man’s—and such a man! All the family made jokes about the weakling Percy and his enormous boys. I dropped the biggest brick of all just after I came back from England. I went on about Hetty and the protoplasm when Austin suddenly turned on me in a blazing rage. I had never known him do such a thing, and I was staggered. In the evening when we were alone in that room full of bassoons which he had at Westhill he apologised and then he told me the whole story.

‘He was ashamed of it. He hated the endless deceptions, especially of Alice, and yet he couldn’t help being proud and fond of Hetty’s sons. Poor old boy,’ Arthur added reflectively, ‘from twenty-two till the end of his life, there was no escape. Whenever he was in Australia which he felt was his home, much more than Waterpark, he was afraid that a bomb might explode under him at any moment, that his life and all his affections might be wrecked. By nature he was the
most straightforward man alive, yet he was always forced to acquiesce in deceit, and for ten years to practise it even against his wife. It soured his open and generous nature. He became suspicious, wondering who might know about the scandal. He blew himself up into greater importance than he had, and as a kind of defence compiled a book of all the people in Melbourne who had convict ancestors, but he didn’t keep it in Melbourne. It was in the library at Waterpark. D’you know what happened to it?’

‘I never saw it,’ I said. ‘It was probably sold with the house.’

‘Good God!’ exclaimed Arthur. This possibility distracted him further from the thread of his story, but not for long. He was determined now to tell me everything, and though occasionally he might be drawn aside by some irrelevant association, or be seized by some ribald conceit, he was more serious in manner than usual. He was justifying Austin to his descendants, and he went on:

‘Well, after Papa’s death they all came back to Melbourne. Mama bought this house and Alice took a house opposite Kilawly where those red-brick flats are now. Austin, with ten thousand miles between himself and Hetty, thought no more about her. He got a devil of a jolt when he heard that she was on the way out to Australia, bringing Dell and the baby, and a worse one when she settled only a couple of hundred yards away. Even then he didn’t think it would be anything worse than an uncomfortable reminder of what he’d rather forget. But Hetty didn’t want to forget. She hadn’t been in the house a fortnight, when she sent over a message by the milk-boy, asking if Austin would come over and fix
some broken thing in the house, a tap or a door handle or something. It was a natural enough request for someone who had just moved in. Dell was in town for the day. When Austin arrived Hetty didn’t bother about the door handle. She had sent out their servant and nurse or whatever they had, and they were alone in the house. She took him into her bedroom to show him the sleeping baby, and she said: “Our son” and stood close against Austin. He was very emotional and though he didn’t
like
Hetty, she excited him. Almost before he knew what he’d done, it had happened again. He went home in a funk, disgusted with himself and furious with Hetty, determined not to let it go on. He did everything he could to avoid seeing her alone, but she kept sending over about the door handles.’

Although Arthur’s face was solemn and almost tearful as he told me this, he could not resist his instinct to put it in a ridiculous light. He loved to fix on some commonplace article like a door handle, and turn it into an obscene symbol.

‘He said he wouldn’t go over and mend her bloody door handles, but Alice actually forced him to, saying it would be unkind to refuse. He half-felt that this gave him a kind of excuse, and off he went again. He was probably feeling like it at that moment, and people aren’t consistent in their feelings, especially about that sort of thing. Then she told him that she was going to have another child by him, and he felt trapped, especially when the baby was born and it was the spitting image of Austin. There is no Langton blood in the Mayhews, and Austin is a pure Langton—he doesn’t take after Mama, but the fact that they were cousins was used to explain the likeness of Hetty’s boys to Austin. What I can’t understand is
how Hetty managed to have children only by Austin all the time he was in Australia. I suppose she played some gynaecological trick on Dell which the ordinary man doesn’t know about. The poor devil didn’t even deserve to be called a protoplasm. Even after this second child was born Austin tried to break with her. It was like trying to break from the clutch of a gorilla. That is the real reason why he persuaded Alice to buy Westhill and move into the country. If they hadn’t done that Mama wouldn’t have agreed to go to England again, so Hetty has had far-reaching effects.’ Arthur paused, thinking of his own marriage, perhaps wondering what he would have done if he had not married Damaris Tunstall and inherited her money. As he told me this story it became evident how much our misfortune and our good luck were dependent one on the other.