The Cardboard Crown (3 page)

‘I might possibly find some in the laundry,’ I said. ‘Dominic seems to have amused himself by scattering his penates in the outhouses. Actually there is some material of the sort you mention. Yesterday I found a uniform case in the harness room. It was full of old parchments, some seventeenth century, one from the Herald’s College, and with them were my grandmother’s diaries almost complete from her marriage to her death.’

‘There you have the whole thing!’ exclaimed Julian.

‘They tell nothing exciting. I glanced at them. The entries are mostly things like “Hetty came to luncheon. Mildred wore her new dress, a rather ugly blue”. Even if there are other things I couldn’t possibly use them. I should have to leave this place which I have sweated to bring back to life, and
return to England, or to France or Italy. And yet that is what I’ve always longed for, the literary freedom of the outcast—to be like Verlaine or somebody who did not have to worry when he sat down to write, whether he would offend Aunt Maysie, or whether it would lose him an invitation from Mrs Vane. It would be a profound satisfaction not to bother about this any more, but to write exactly what one believed to be true about the things one knew best. I suppose that is what I know about best, all the events and influences of the last eighty years which have made us what we are and which culminated in this house in Dominic’s final rack of mental anguish. It’s what I said to you just now. Everyone can write one book. This would be my one real book. I’d go on writing it till I die.’

In spite of myself I was taken with the idea.

‘It would be wrong not to do it,’ said Julian.

‘Your idea of right and wrong is not the same as Aunt Maysie’s,’ I said, ‘although, changing the meaning of the word a little, you are more Right than she is. I am supposed to be extremely snobbish, even in Melbourne, the most snobbish place on earth. The reason is that my snobbery is of a different kind. It is not concerned with the horizontal divisions of society, but with the vertical, which is down the middle, “
per pale
” as the Heralds say on that document in the harness room. At the top on the Right is the duke, and at the top on the Left is the international financier. At the bottom on the Right is the peasant—on the Left the factory worker. On the Right between the duke and the peasant are all kinds of landowners and farmers, all artists and craftsmen, soldiers, sailors, clergymen and musicians. On the Left side are
business men, stockbrokers, bankers, exporters, all men whose sole reason for working is to make money, and also mechanics and aviators. We on the Right cannot make money. When we have it, it has only come to us as an accident following on our work, or from luck. There are those whose place is on the right of the
pale
but who express the ideas of the Left. They are traitors. They imagine that by breaking down the pale, giving that word a slightly double meaning, they are releasing humanity into wider fields, when in reality they are letting in the beasts of the jungle. One could enlarge on this, explaining how doctors are on the Right of the
pale
because they put their work before money, but near the Left because of their materialistic conception of life. Lawyers are on the Right because of their concern with justice, but near the Left because they serve business interests. Scientists are not concerned with money, but they are the supreme servants of the Left. In satisfying their vicious curiosity they are prepared to deny all we know of good, and even to destroy the world. This division
per pale
is also not unrelated to the political division between Right and Left, but do not imagine that the big business Tories who have wrecked Europe are on the Right. It also has some connection with the heraldic term “sinister” for the Left side of the shield. Again, if you are clumsy in spirit you are
gauche.
Even at the Last Judgment the division is
per pale
, and those at the Left Hand of God are plunged into Hell. There is also I believe a term in boxing—the dirty Left.

‘This is not really true, of course,’ I went on, ‘but one must talk a great deal of nonsense to arrive at a little truth. If you go mining, you must dig up a great deal of quartz to find
a little gold. If you only dig as much quartz as you want gold, you will have hardly any gold at all.’

‘I’ve always thought the Left was right,’ said Julian. He was smiling but a little truculent.

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘You don’t believe it at all. If you did you couldn’t paint as you do. Your painting would damn you at once if the Communists had power. It’s traditional, rooted in nature, Catholic, it breathes the inescapable sorrows of the human race. It denies flatly that science can cure the soul of man. Otherwise how could I have asked you to decorate a room in this house?’

‘You’re trying to get away from the novel.’

‘Not at all. What I have been saying has to do with it. All these people you want me to write about were far on the right side of the
pale
. One must understand what that means before you can understand them. I might write this book, and let all the skeletons come tumbling out of the cupboards, but allow only you to read it. Then you would bear our curse in your heart, like that Scottish family whose eldest son never smiles after his twenty-first birthday.’

‘What curse?’ asked Julian.

‘Doesn’t it appear to you that we are cursed? I don’t know where it comes from, probably the duque de Teba.’

‘Who was he?’

‘You haven’t heard of him? Then I’d better not tell you.’

‘I promise not to believe you,’ said Julian smiling.

‘Then what’s the use of telling you? By the way, the patterns have come for the chapel. You might as well choose them now, or at any rate see what they look like at night.’

I pulled open a drawer and took out some squares of
gold and soft red damask and brocade, and we went to that room which always filled me with such great depression that I was turning it into a chapel, in the same way that the Church of S. Maria del Popolo in Rome was built over the tomb of Nero, to scatter the devils gathered there. My mind automatically went to the chapel on the mention of the duque de Teba.

In that room all flippancy left me, and I was subject to the heavy influences of the place, though these were not so great since Julian had done his murals. I looked first at the huge crucifixion painted by Dominic, the tortured body, the face hidden by hanging hair, the conspicuous genitals. It was not a thing that could properly be shown, except perhaps to Carthusian monks on Good Friday, and yet I could not bring myself to paint it out. Dominic must have been a kind of throwback to that Spanish forbear of whom I had not yet told Julian. With his
anima naturaliter Catholica,
but brought up in dreary low-church Anglicanism, he had painted as it were on the cross formed by his inner desire and his habit of mind, this terrible figure. Apparently he had used this room as an oratory. When I arrived there was no furniture in it beyond a hard wooden chair and a Bible. I could not use it for any other purpose with that painting on the wall. Julian also had something dark in his imagination, probably derived from the same source, though in him the Spanish passion was blended with both German brutality and the Langtons’ weeping tenderness of heart, which gave his work a sombre beauty. I thought that he would be able to paint murals round the entire chapel which would incorporate the crucifixion and so make it appear less starkly
horrifying. He did the other walls splendidly, but when he came to Dominic’s painting, and tried to think of some way of relating his own to it, he admitted himself beaten, so we decided to frame it off in a separate panel, in a large empty eighteenth-century frame which I had found in the stables, and to have it normally covered with a damask curtain. It was for him to choose a colour related to his murals that I had brought in these squares of stuff. Before considering them our eyes turned automatically to Dominic’s painting.

‘It is pure duque de Teba,’ I said. ‘So is yours. Those murals could only be painted by someone whose ancestors had looked into hell.’

‘Well, really …’ protested Julian.

‘It’s the highest praise I could give you. All I mean is that in your blood is the awareness of evil combined with an obsession with the good.’

‘And does it come from this thingummy Teba?’

‘It’s more likely to have come from him than anyone else.’

‘But who was he?’

‘He was my mother’s and your father’s direct ancestor. When his wife died he had himself ordained priest, but he was executed for strangling his altar-boys after Mass in the cellars of his castle in Aragon.’

Julian looked at me incredulously.

‘It’s just quartz,’ he said. ‘You’re making it up.’

‘Unfortunately I’m not. His two daughters went to England to escape the scandal, and one married beneath her a Suffolk squire with nine thousand acres, and the other an Irishman named O’Hara. The squire’s daughter married beneath her a naval officer called Masterman. Her daughter
married beneath her your great-grandfather, Captain Byngham, the nephew of an Irish viscount. Her daughter married beneath her Steven Langton, my father. Because of the duque de Teba they had this habit of mind, that they were always marrying beneath them.’

The wine I had drunk at the dinner party was having a delayed action. Apart from my retort to the doctor I had not been able to give voice to any of the conceits which occurred to me, and was so occupied in making up for this, that I did not at first notice the effect my disclosures had on Julian.

‘They were proud of being descended from a monster like that,’ he cried. ‘They must have been mad.’ He glanced at his hands and then looked away with almost a shudder. I was surprised, as when this particular skeleton had been unveiled to myself and my brothers, we had been more amused than shocked, except Dominic. Neither Bobby nor Brian nor I had much taint in our blood from the ogre. Whatever vices we may have had, cruelty was not one of them. We were incapable of deliberately and in cold blood inflicting pain, and so this hideous tale only seemed a fantastic legend to us, like one of Grimm’s fairy tales. But Dominic and Julian had a darker knowledge which was denied us. To them the tale was vivid, and so Julian recoiled from it more violently, even though he was a generation farther away from the wicked duke.

‘If you can’t be proud of the monster,’ I said, ‘you can at least be grateful to him. It’s your Teba blood that gives you your passionate impulse towards forms of art, that makes you see in the Australian landscape not only sunlight and dreamy
distances, but dark forces lurking in the trees. When you feel that creative tingling in the tips of your fingers, you have the same impulse as the duque. He could not create beauty, so he could only release his impulse in destroying it. Then for two or three generations this impulse lay dormant in the blood of Suffolk and Sligo squires. It probably only gave a greater zest to their fighting and foxhunting, until we come to my mother and your father, who both married Langtons. The Langtons are witty, immensely agile in mind, but not creative. They can express ideas with great lucidity, but their ideas are shallow. However, though sterile themselves, they could fertilise the Byngham blood into creative activity. All that vigour, that appreciation of life, that enjoyment of form and movement and colour, which hitherto could only express itself in galloping after foxes, or more experimentally, a stage nearer the blossoming of art, in the murder of altar boys, was by this mercurial infusion released from the state of being into the state of knowing, as if the brain of Zeus, before Pallas Athene could spring from his head, had been fertilised by Hermes. The result was you and Dominic, and even I when young felt faint gusts of this desire to pierce truth to the heart, to see what she was made of, or perhaps myself to be pierced by the eyes of a god. It is this which makes me so tempted by this dangerous idea of writing the truth about all of us, about all I know, not merely putting it in a light which will be acceptable to Aunt Maysie. And if I did it and she read it and didn’t like it, she would be unreasonable, for she and all of us in a few years, if our souls survive, must face the truth. In twenty years I shall be dead or dithering. How idiotic to shirk reality for the sake of a few dinner parties!’

Although I was, like a true Langton, especially one who was slightly tipsy, letting fancy control, or rather release, my mind, Julian was looking at me seriously. His pupils were enlarged. Behind him was one of the walls he had painted, the harsh Australian landscape, the branches of the trees blackened with fire, the distant hilltops glistening with dead trunks, and against this background, in the soft deep blues and reds of renaissance clothing, Christ dining
al fresco
, with the publicans. Behind me was Dominic’s terrible crucifixion.

Suddenly I felt that I had gone too far, that although I half meant what I said, I had been guilty of the hideous vulgarity of talking facetiously about things that involved great human suffering. I said, completely changing the tone of my voice:

‘Really one shouldn’t talk about this sort of thing at this time of night.’

‘Now you are spoiling yourself,’ said Julian.

This gave me a curious sensation, partly of annoyance that anyone as young as Julian should criticise me, partly of satisfaction that he should recognise that I had some basis of seriousness to spoil. I had thought that his generation regarded me as an amiable but obsolete frivolity, like an ornate glass shade to a gas lamp.

‘We had better choose the stuff,’ I said, and for ten minutes or so one of us held up squares of material against the wall, while the other went to the other side of the room to judge the effect. We did not take long, as it was obvious that a soft old gold damask was the most suitable.

‘Oh well, it’s bed time,’ I said, ‘but I don’t feel at all sleepy.’

‘Why not bring in the diaries,’ asked Julian, ‘and see what’s in them?’

‘We can bring them in if you like,’ I said. ‘The cool air may do us good, but we can’t read them tonight.’

I opened the door and disturbed Dudley lying against it. When he saw us going down the passage instead of to bed, he stared after us in consternation, and then followed in silent protest. I picked up an electric torch in the lobby and we went across the stable yard to the harness room, where, lying among some old picture frames and a broken music stand, was the dented black tin uniform case, with my grandfather’s name painted on it in large white letters. Julian took one end and I the other, and we carried it indoors.