The Edwardians (7 page)

It was Sebastian's suggestion that they should go up on to the roof.

He shut Sarah and Henry into the library, and, taking a candle, led the way. Anquetil was moved by this vision of the boy passing, candle in hand, through the shadows and splendours of his inheritance. For the great rooms had lain in darkness till the candle disturbed them; the great rooms of state, that were never used now, but preserved their ancient furnishings, their gildings and velvets, and seemed in the light of the candle to flutter still with a life that had but barely departed from them. Such illumination was far more suggestive than the light of day, by which Anquetil had first seen them. Then, the silver tripods, the portraits, the tapestry, the long, polished floors, had stood out plainly visible, silent and motionless, with no mystery attaching to them—nothing except the very obvious interest of their age, their survival, their state of preservation; and their intrinsic beauty. As dead as a museum, Anquetil had thought, in the resistant mood that then possessed him. He had looked, he had admired, but it had been a dutiful admiration; he had not been touched. Now, he saw the old rooms quiver in the uncertain light thus unexpectedly imported, and learnt that some things gained through being indistinctly seen, things that were too delicate and frail to stand the full truth of day. For not seeing is half-believing. That he should make such an admission was a proof that he had travelled a long way since the morning, when he believed himself to be a matter-of-fact man, concerned only with the hard outlines (as he conceived them) of objects, relationships, and situations. Now, he perceived that aspects might alter, and that actuality was a fiction, dependent solely on the observer, his mood, and his prejudice. The old rooms, in the candlelight, inspired him with a tenderness he would not by daylight have credited. Their beauty, which he had thought to be exterior, became significant; they were quickened by the breath of some existence which they had once enjoyed, when no eye regarded them as a museum, but took them for granted as the natural setting for daily life; and that applied to their furnishings too, to the mirrors into whose dim pools women had stolen many a frank or furtive glance; to the chairs whose now faded velvets had received the weight of limbs regardless of mud on the boots. Nevertheless, Anquetil still strove against them. He would not be deluded into sentimentality about things that were dead, merely because it was possible to convince oneself that they had once been alive. This dead beauty inspired him again almost with horror, as he reacted against his own momentary softening, and the resolution returned to him to save Sebastian if he possibly could. The boy, he thought, is already lying in state in a splendid tomb. We will see if we cannot make the effigy jump up and run.

The gleam of the candle mounted the dark stairs and stirred the shadows of the long low attics. There was no colour up here, neither velvets nor gilding; nothing but plaster and grey oak the colour of ashes. Anquetil preferred this bareness to the sumptuous rooms downstairs; he thought he saw the bones of the house stripped of their flesh; and indeed these silvery galleries recalled the pallor of a skeleton. In certain tombs, he reflected—his mind still running on dissolution—in certain tombs, the skeleton lies exposed beneath the monument, a humble and yet terrible reminder; but here it is otherwise; the house is dying from the top; this uppermost floor is deserted wholly, and all the cheerful bustle has departed from it; it lies stretched in the ashen hues of mortality, immediately below the roof that thinly divides it from the sky. The tiles are no thicker than paper. And he thought that when he had come downstairs again, and was in the living rooms with their deep curtained windows and comfortable sofas, rooms a degree less dead than the state rooms on the middle floor, he would remember the attics at the top of the house, silent and blanched and empty, the shadow of the lattice faintly chequering the boards, attics, stretched horizontally beneath the roofline, like an old skeleton that has been laid to rest out of sight and whose presence everyone has conspired to ignore.

It was evident that neither Sebastian nor Viola had any such feelings about their home. This frightened Anquetil, by now strung up to an unusual pitch of sensitiveness: he felt that they
ought
to rebel against the oppression of the past. According to his ideas, they were in no healthy condition if they did not so rebel. He himself was in a state of violent and alarmed resistance; warring emotions tore him; he was determined not to sink under enchantment, but in order to preserve his safety he must keep all his faculties critically on the alert—the only inhabitant of the palace of Sleeping Beauty able to stick pins into his flesh and startle himself from the overtaking sleep. In two days the spell had worked to this extent! and he recollected the mood that had passed over him at dinner, when he glanced up at the portrait of Frobisher, and saw himself in the light of the impecunious adventurer, and Sebastian in the light of the potential patron, whose capricious sympathy might be turned to good account. Such revolution had a bare two days worked in him! Such a spell was the spell of Chevron and the past! But Sebastian and Viola, they had had, respectively, nineteen and seventeen years of it, added to centuries of it in their blood: it was a wonder that they were still alive—awake—at all.

He moved between them, Sebastian with his candle going on ahead, Viola gliding behind. They were the two natural inhabitants of this exquisite sepulchre, moving amongst its shadows as freely as nocturnal visitants amongst gravestones, and Anquetil revolted against their assumption of franchise, their ease, in these (to him) suffocating surroundings, lethal for all their beauty.

Sebastian blew out the candle as they emerged on to the roof. The night-breeze ruffled their hair. The stars were thickly sown overhead in a black sky. Anquetil, as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, made out the square crenellation of the battlements and the shapes of the towers rising square across the chasm of the courtyards. It was not possible to see anything very distinctly, but he had the impression of a vast, broken roofline, and of being at a great height above the lawns and tree-tops of the sleeping garden. He saw that the short ridges of the battlements and the longer ridges of the roofs were outlined in a clarity that could not be called light, yet sufficed to distinguish them from the mass of darkness that suggested, without entirely revealing, the intricacies and bulk of the structure. His resentment against the house again vanished, now that it had become part of the night air which cooled him and which was a thing he could understand. He liked Sebastian better, and with less complication, for having brought them up here. But ardently, ardently he wished Viola away.

They stood upon the leaded flats, but with a gesture Sebastian invited him to climb; he was himself already springing up the pent of the roof like a young feline animal. Anquetil followed. He liked Sebastian for having forgotten the twenty-odd years of difference in their ages. He liked this roof adventure, with the possibilities involved in a false step. He liked Sebastian's boyishness, freed from his mother. So up they went, the two of them, Anquetil not willing to admit that he was less agile than the boy or less practised in this kind of exercise, for Sebastian's personality had so inspired him with romantic notions that he now knew that as a sailor and an adventurer he would be expected to display an agility acquired amongst the rigging. Over the roofs he went, scrambling up and sliding down, under the guidance of one who was intimately acquainted with the house's intricate geography, until Anquetil had completely lost his bearings among the chimney-stacks, the battlements, and the gables, and would have been incapable of finding his way back had Sebastian elected to disappear and to leave him up there, waiting for the dawn. Never once did Sebastian look back to see if his companion still followed him, but climbed and leapt and ran as one possessed by genius, or as one that puts another man to the test, mischievous, unmerciful, and mocking. Anquetil was hard put to it to keep up with him, but he would sooner have broken his neck than cried out. It was a duel between them; from a mere prank, it had turned into an affair of honour. Or was it flight and pursuit?—for the most fanciful ideas now crowded into Anquetil's head, under the stars—was Sebastian flying from him, conscious of some conspiracy? was he making an ally of his house, using its jumble of roofs as a protection against his pursuer? And as though Anquetil had spoken his thoughts aloud, he cried suddenly over his shoulder, “You haven't caught me yet.”

He was invisible in the darkness as he spoke, but next moment he appeared, sitting astride a long ridge of roof, gaily waving his hand to Anquetil below. Thus defied, Anquetil went up, hand over hand; creeping on his knees up the sloping tiles. Cautiously he got astride the ridge and began edging his way along, but Sebastian with a ringing laugh receded from him, enticing him on. Anquetil was now seized with the determination to triumph; he felt that something extremely important depended upon it. But to his horror, Sebastian, seeing himself overtaken, rose to his feet, swayed for one moment against the stars, and fell.

Anquetil caught him, though how he did it he never knew. He caught and held him, hanging above the black pit of the courtyard below. “Well,” he said, looking down into the boy's upturned face, “now, at any rate, I have you at my mercy. What if I let you go?” “I shall crash, that's all,” said Sebastian; “pull me up. How long are you going to keep me dangling here?” “That depends,” said Anquetil, settling himself more firmly. He was holding Sebastian by both wrists. “You have had your fun with me, my young friend; now I think it's my turn. You look very foolish, let me tell you, lying there spread-eagle on the tiles of your ancestral home. Pride has had a fall—very nearly a nasty fall. But you seem quite calm. I see that the patrician can face death with dignity—even a ludicrous death. I congratulate you.”

“Well, you are a queer sort of fellow, to be sure,” said Sebastian.

“Do I seem queer to you? I assure you, you seem equally queer to me. There are several things I have been wanting to say to you. Shall we talk?”

“Like this?” said Sebastian.

“No, not like this,” said Anquetil, and pulled Sebastian up so that they sat facing one another. “But we will remain here, if you please. After all, consider: the accident of birth has given you a great many advantages over me, it's only fair that I should make the most of the only occasion when I am likely to be in an equal position. Your personal safety is assured, and my personal vanity is satisfied. You shall not be bored. I will entertain you with some remarks about your life and mine.”

“You are a jester, evidently,” said Sebastian, “but I like your humour. Talk away.”

“I am a man of the people,” said Anquetil. “My father owned a fishing smack in a little village in Devonshire. I wanted to go to sea, but they sent me to school instead, and I was sensible enough not to run away. I am, you see, eminently sensible and practical. I worked hard; I had brains; I got a scholarship; I finally went to Oxford. All the time I continued to think about going to sea, but I was patient enough to wait and shrewd enough not to underrate the value of education. When I had done with Oxford I fell in with a man who was taking an expedition to Siberia; he asked me to go with him. We were to look for mammoths. We found fossilised mammoths in the banks of frozen rivers, and by the remains of food still adhering to their teeth we were able to throw some interesting light upon their diet. We were away for a year and a half; and as our researches had met with some success, I have never since lacked employment. You know quite enough about my various undertakings for me to spare you any account of them now. I only wanted to emphasise the difference between our lives. “

“Wait,” said Sebastian. “I am at Oxford now. I am where you were twenty-odd years ago. How do you know what my life will be after I have left?”

Anquetil laughed. “My dear boy, your life was mapped out for you from the moment you were born. You went to a preparatory school; you went to Eton; you are now at Oxford; you will go into the Guards; you will have various love affairs, mostly with fashionable married women; you will frequent wealthy and fashionable houses; you will attend Court functions; you will wear a white-and-scarlet uniform—and look very handsome in it, too—you will be flattered and persecuted by every mother in London; you will eventually become engaged to a suitable young lady; you will marry her in the chapel here and the local bishop will officiate; you will beget an heir and several other children, who ought to have been painted by Hoppner; you will then acquire the habit of being unfaithful to your wife and she to you; you will both know it and both, out of sheer good manners and the force of civilisation, will tacitly agree to ignore your mutual infidelities; you will sometimes make a speech in the House of Lords; you will be given the Garter; you will send your sons to a preparatory school, Eton, Oxford, and into the Guards; after dinner you will talk about socialism and the growth of democracy; you will be worried but not seriously disturbed; on the twelfth of August you will go north to shoot grouse, on the first of September you will return south to shoot partridges, on the first of October you will shoot pheasants; your photograph will appear in the illustrated papers, propped on a shooting stick with two dogs and a loader; you will celebrate your golden wedding; you will carry a spur or a helmet at the next coronation; you will begin to wonder if your son(aged fifty-one) wants you to die; you will oblige him by dying at last, and your coffin will be borne to the family vault on a farm cart accompanied by a procession of your employees and your tenants. And during all those years, you will never escape from Chevron.”

“But I don't want to escape from Chevron,” said Sebastian.

“No,” said Anquetil, shifting his position a little, “you don't want to escape from Chevron. You think that you love it, that you give it glad and happy service, but you are really its victim. A place like Chevron is really a despot of the most sinister sort: it disguises its tyranny under the mask of love. Would you like to know what a man like me thinks of a place like Chevron? It fascinates, horrifies, and shocks me. Remember, I come from a cottage myself, and have been accustomed to see families living overcrowded and poor, for so long as I can remember. But it is not the contrast which shocks me. It is not the fact that you employ fifty servants and can choose your room amongst three or four hundred rooms, when parents and children elsewhere are sleeping together in a bed. No. It is the effect on you yourself. You are not allowed to be a free agent. Your life has been ordained for you from the beginning. I will give you the benefit of the doubt. I will agree that probably you will do your duty according to your lights, you will befriend your tenants, rule justly over your servants, take the chair at meetings, earn the respect of your equals—all this when once you have ceased to be a wild young man—but you will be dead, you will be a stuffed image.”